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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



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Leading Facts of American History. Montgomery, - - - $i oo 
Social Institutions of the United States. Bryce, - - - i oo 
Initial Studies in American Letters. Beers, - . . . i oo 

Story of the Constitution of the United States. Thorpe, - - 60 
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INITIAL STUDIES 



IN 



American Letters 



BY 

HENRY A. BEERS 



-.-CONS 



'f^l. 



nil 1S1B91 , 



';mNGf'^ 



c- 



NEW YORK 

CHAUTAUQUA PRESS 

C. L. S. C. Department, ISO Fifth Avenue 

1891 



The required books of the C. L. S. C. are reco mm ended by a Council 
of Six. It must, however, be understood that recommendation does not 
involve an approval by the Council, or by any member of it, of every 
principle or doctrine contained in the book recommended. 



Copyright, 1891, by Hunt & Eaton, New York. 



io PREFACE 



t: 



This volume is intended as a companion to tlie historical 
sketch of English literature, entitled From Chaucer to Ten- 
nyson, published last year for the Chautauqua Circle. In 
writing it I have followed the same plan, aiming to present 
the subject in a sort of continuous essay rather than in the 
form of a "primer" or elementary manual. I have not un- 
dertaken to describe, or even to mention, every American 
author or book of importance, but only those which seemed 
to me of most significance. Nevertheless I believe that the 
sketch contains enough detail to make it of some use as a 
guide-book to our literature. Though meant to be mainly 
a history of American helles-lettreSy it makes some mention 
of historical and political writings, but hardly any of philo- 
sophical, scientific, and technical works. 

A chronological rather than a topical order has been fol- 
lowed, although the fact that our best literature is of recent 
growth has made it impossible to adhere as closely to a 
chronological plan as in the English sketch. In tlie reading 
courses appended to the different chapters I have named a 
few of the most important authorities in American literary 
liistory, such as Duyckinck, Tyler, Stedman, and Richardson. 
IMy thanks are due to the authors and publishers who have 
kindly allowed me the use of copyrighted matter for the 



6 Preface. 

appendix ; especially to Mr. Park Godwin and IMessrs. 
D. Appleton & Co. for the passages from ]5ryant ; to 
Messrs. A. C. Armstrong & Son for the selections from Poe ; 
to the Rev. E. E, Hale and Messrs. Roberts Brothers for 
the extract from The Man Without a Country ; to Walt 
Whitman for his two poems; and to Mr. Clemens and the 
American Publishing Co, for the passage from Tlie Junip- 
incj Fi'og. Henry A. Beers, 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. PAGE 

The Colonial Period, 1607-1765 9 

CHAPTER II. 
The Revolutionary Period, 1765-1815 42 

CHAPTER III. 
The Era op National Expansion, 1815-1837 68 

CHAPTER IV. 
The Concord Writers, 18:57-1861 , 93 

CHAPTER V, 
The Cambridge Scholars, 1837-1861 121 

CHAPTER VI. 
Literature in the Cities, 1837-18G1 151 

CHAPTER VII. 
Literature Since 1861 182 

Appendix 213 



INITIAL STUDIES 

IX 

AMERICAN LETTERS 



CHAPTER I. 

THE COLONIAL PERIOD. 
1607-1765, 

TriE Avritings of our colonial era have a much greater im- 
portance as history than as literature. It would be unfair 
to judge of the intellectual vigor of the English colonists in 
America by the books that they wrote; those "stern men 
with empires in their brains " had more pressing work to do 
than the making of books. The first settlers, indeed, were 
brought face to face with strange and exciting conditions — 
the sea, the wilderness, the Indians, the flora and fauna of a 
new world — things which seem stimulatinsc to the imao-ina- 
tion, and incidents and experiences which might have lent 
themselves easily to poetry or romance. Of all these they 
wrote back to England reports which Avere faithful and some- 
times vivid, but which, ujjon the whole, hardly rise into the 
region of literature. "New England," said Hawthorne, 
" was then in a state incomparably moi'e picturesque than at 
present." But to a contemporary that old New England of 
the seventeenth century doubtless seemed any thing but pict- 
uresque, filled with grim, hard, work-day realities. The 
planters both of Yii-ginia and Massachusetts were decimated 
by sickness and starvation, constantly threatened by Indian 
wars, and ti'oubled by quarrels among themselves and fears 



10 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

<tf disturbance from England. The wrangles betwocMi the 
royal governors and the House of Burgesses in the Old Do- 
minion, and the theological squabbles in New England, which 
till our colonial records, are petty and wearisome to read of. 
At least, they would be so did we not bear in mind to what 
imperial destinies these conflicts were slowly educating the 
little communities which had hardly yet secured a foothold 
on the edge of the raw continent. 

Even a century and a half after the Jamestown and Plym- 
outh settlements, when the American plantations had grown 
strong and flourishing, and commerce was building up large 
towns, and there were wealth and generous living and fine 
society, the " good old colony days when we lived under the 
king," had yielded little in the Avay of literature that is of 
any permanent interest. There would seem to be something 
in the relation of a colony to the mother-country which 
dooms the thought and art of the former to a helpless pro- 
vincialism. C^anada and Australia are great provinces, 
wealthier and more populous than tlie thirteen colonies at 
the time of their separation from England. They have cities 
whose iiduibitants number hundreds of thousands, well- 
equipped universities, libraries, cathedrals, costly public 
buildings, all the outward appliances of an advanced civili- 
zation; and yet what have Canada and Australia contributed 
to British literature ? 

American literature had no infancy. That engaging na- 
'ivete and that heroic rudeness Mdiich give a charm to the 
early i)opular tales and songs of Europe find, of course, no 
counterpart on our soil. Instead of emerging from the twi- 
liglit of the past the first American writings were produced 
under the garish noon of a modern and learned age. Decrep- 
itude rather than j^outhf ulness is the mark of a colonial liter- 
ature. The poets, in pai-ticular, instead of finding a challenge 
to their imagination in the new life about them, are apt to 
go on imitating the cast-off literary fashions of the mother- 



The Colonial Period. 11 

country. America was settled by Englishmen who were 
contemporary with the greatest names in English literature. 
Jamestown was planted in 1607, nine years before Shakes- 
peare's death, and the hero of that enterprise, Captain John 
Smith, may not improbably have been a personal acquaint- 
ance of the great dramatist. "They have acted my fatal 
tragedies on the stage," wrote Smith. Many\circumstanccs 
in The Tempest were doubtless suggested by the wreck of 
the Sea Yenture on "the still vext Bermoothes," as described 
by William Strachey in his True Reportory of the Wrack and 
RedempAlon of Sir Thomas Gates, written at Jamestown, 
and published at London in 1610. Shakespeare's contempo- 
rary, Michael Drayton, the poet of the Polyolhlon, addressed 
a spirited valedictory ode to the three shiploads of " brave, 
heroic minds" who sailed from London in 1606 to colonize 
Virginia, an ode which ended with the prophecy of a future 
American literature: 

" And as there plenty grows 

Of laurel every-wliere — 

Apollo's sacred tree — 

You it may see 

A poet's brows 

To crown, that may sing there." 

Another English poet, Samuel Daniel, the autlior of the 
Civil Wars, had also prophesied in a similar strain: 

" And who in time knows whither we may vent 
The treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores . . . 

What worlds in the yet unformed Occident 
May come refined with accents that are ours ? " 

It needed but a slight movement in the balances of fate, 
and Walter Raleigh might have been reckoned among the 
poets of America. He was one of the original jjromoters of 
the Virginia colony, and he made voyages in person to New- 
foundland and Guiana. And more unlikely things have 



12 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

happened than that when John Milton left Cambridge in 
1632 he should have been tempted to follow Winthrop and 
the colonists of Massachusetts Bay, who had sailed two years 
before. Sir Henry Vane, the younger, who was afterward 
Milton's friend — 

" Vane, young in years, but in sage counsel old " — 

came over in 1G35, and was for a short time governor of 
Massachusetts. These are idle speculations, and yet, when 
we reflect that Oliver Cromwell was on the point of embark- 
ing for America when he was prevented by the king's ofti- 
cers, we may, for the nonce, " let our frail thoughts dally 
with false surmise," and fancy by how narrow a chance 
Paradise Lost missed being written in Boston. But, as a 
rule, the members of the literary guild are not quick to emi- 
grate. They like the feeling of an old and rich civilization 
about them, a state of society which America has only begun 
to reach during the present century. 

Virginia and New England, says Lowell, were the " two 
great distributing centers of the English race." The men 
who colonized the country between the Caj^es of Virginia 
were not drawn, to any large extent, from the literary or 
bookish classes in the old country. Many of the first set- 
tlers were gentlemen — too many. Captain Smith thought-, for 
the good of the plantation. Some among these were men 
of worth and spirit, " of good means and great parentage." 
Such was, for example, George Percy, a younger brother of 
the Earl of Northumberland, who was one of the original 
adventurers, and the author of A Discourse of the Planta- 
tion of the Southern Colony of Virginia, which contains a 
graphic narrative of the fever and famine summer of 1607 
at Jamestown. But many of these gentlemen were idlers, 
" unruly gallants, packed thither by their friends to escape 
ill destinies; " dissipated younger sons, soldiers of fortune, 
who came over after the gold which was supposed to abound 



The Colonial Period. 13 

in the iieAV country, and who spent tlieir time in playing 
bowls and drinking at the tavern as soon as there was any 
tavern. With these was a sprinkling of mechanics and 
farmers, indented servants, and the off-scourings of the Lon- 
don streets, fruit of press-gangs and jail deliveries, sent over 
to " work in the plantations." 

Nor were the conditions of life afterward in Virginia very 
favorable to literary growth. The planters lived isolated 
on great estates which had water-fronts on the rivers that 
flow into the Chesapeake. There the tobacco, the chief 
staple of the country, was loaded directly upon the trading 
vessels that tied u|) to the long, narrow wharves of the plan- 
tations. Surrounded by his slaves, and visited occasionally 
by a distant neighbor, the Virginia country gentleman lived 
a free and careless life. He was fond of fox-hunting, horse- 
racing, and cock-fighting. There were no large towns, and 
the })lanters met each other mainly on occasion of a county 
court or the assembling of the Burgesses. The court-house 
was the nucleus of social and political life in Virginia as the 
town-meeting was in New England. In such a state of so- 
ciety schools were necessarily few, and popular education did 
not exist. Sir William Berkeley, who was the royal gover- 
nor of the colony from 164] to 1677, said, in 1670, " I thank 
God there are no free schools nor printing, and I hope we 
shall not have these hundred years." In the matter of j^rint- 
ing this pious wish was well-nigh realized. The first press 
set up in the colony, about 1681, was soon suppressed, and 
found no successor until the year 1729. From that date 
until some ten years before the Kevolution one printing- 
jji'ess answered the needs of Virginia, and this was under 
ofticial control. The earliest newspaper in the colony was 
the Virginia Gazette, established in 1736. 

In the absence of schools the higher education naturally 
languished. Some of the planters were taught at home by 
tutors, and othei'S went to England and entered the univcr- 



14 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

sities. But these were few in number, and there was no col- 
lege in the colony until more than half a century after the 
foundation of Harvard in the younger province of Massa- 
chusetts. The college of William and Mary was established 
at Williamsburg chiefly by the exertions of the Rev. James 
Blair, a Scotch divine, who was sent by the Bishop of Lon- 
don as " commissary " to the Church in Virginia. The col- 
lege received its charter in 1693, and held its first commence- 
ment in IVOO. It is perhaps significant of the difference 
between the Puritans of New England and the so-called 
" Cavaliers" of Virginia, that while the former founded and 
supported Harvard College in 1636, and Yale in 1701, of 
their own motion and at their own expense, William and 
Mary 'received its endowment from the crown, being pro- 
vided for in part by a deed of lands and in part by a tax of 
a penny a pound on all tobacco exported I'rom the colony. 
In return for this royal grant the college was to present 
yearly to the king two copies of Latin verse. It is reported 
of the young Virginian gentlemen who resorted to the new 
college that they brought their plantation maimers with 
them, and were accustomed to " keep race-horses at the col- 
lege, and bet at the billiard or other gaming-tables." AVill- 
iam and Mary College did a good work for the colony, and 
educated some of the great Virginians of the Revolutionary 
era, but it has never been a large or flourishing institution, 
and has held no such relation to the intellectual development 
of its section as Harvard and Yale have held in the colonies 
of Massachusetts and Connecticut. Even after the founda- 
tion of the University of Virginia, in which Jefferson took a 
conspicuous part, Southern youths were commonly sent to 
the North for their education, and at the time of the out- 
break of the civil war there was a large contingent of South- 
ern students in several Northern colleges, notably in Prince- 
ton and Yale. 

Naturally, the first books written in America were descrip- 



The Colonial Pekiod. 15 

tions of the country and narratives of the vicissitudes of the 
infant settlements, which were sent home to be printed for 
the infornuition of the English public and the encouragement 
of further immigration. Among books of this kind pro- 
duced in Virginia the earliest and most noteworthy Avere the 
writings of that famous soldier of fortune, Captain John 
Smith. The first of these was his True Relation, n.amely, 
" of such occurrences and accidents of note as hath happened 
in Virginia since the first planting of that colony," })rinted 
at London in 1G08. Among Smith's other books the most 
important is perhaps his General History of Virginia (Lon- 
don, 1624), a compilation of various narratives by different 
hands, but passing under his name. Smith was a man of a 
restless and daring spirit, full of resource, impatient of con- 
tradiction, and of a somewhat vainglorious nature, with an 
appetite for the marvelous and a disposition to draw the long- 
bow. He had seen service in many parts of the world, and 
his wonderful adventures lost nothing in the telling. It was 
alleged against him that the evidence of his prowess rested 
almost entirely on his own testimony. His truthfulness in 
essentials has not, perhaps, been successfully impugned, but 
his narratives have suffered by the embellishments with 
which he has colored them; and, in particular, the charming 
story of Pocahontas saving his life at the risk of her own — 
the one romance of early Virginian history — has passed into 
the realm of legend. 

paptain Smith's writings have small litei-ary value apart 
from the interest of the events which they describe and the 
diverting but forcible personality which they unconsciously 
display. They are the rough-hewn records of a busy man 
of action, whose sword was mightier than his pen. As Smith 
returned to England after two years in Virginia, and did not 
permanently cast in his lot Avith the settlement of which he 
had been for a time the leading spirit, he can hardly be 
claimed as an American author. No more can Mr. George 



16 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

Sandys, wlio came to Virginia in the train of Governor 
Wyat, in 1G21, and completed liis excellent metrical transla- 
tion of Ovid on the banks of the James, in the midst of the 
Indian massacre of 1622, "limned" as he writes "by that 
imperfect light which was snatched from the hours of night 
and repose, having wars and tumults to bring it to light 
instead of the muses." Sandys went back to England for 
good probably as early as 1625, and can, therefore, no more 
be reckoned as the first American poet, on the strength of 
his parai:)hrase of the Metamorphoses, than he can be reck- 
oned the earliest Yankee inventor because he "introduced 
the first water-mill into America." 

The literature of colonial Virginia, and of the southern 
colonies which took their point of dejiarture from Virginia, 
is almost wholly of this historical and descriptive kind. A 
great part of it is concerned with the internal affairs of the 
province, such as "Bacon's Rebellion," in 1676, one of the 
most striking episodes in our ante-revolutionary annals, and 
of which there exist a number of narratives, some of them 
anonymous, and only rescued from a manuscript condition a 
hundred years after the event. Another part is concerned 
with the exjjlorations of new territory. Such were the 
" Westover Manuscripts," left by Colonel William Byrd, who 
was appointed in 1729 one of the commissioners to fix the 
boundary between Virginia and North Carolina, and gave an 
account of the survey in his History of tlie JDiokllng Line, 
which was printed only in 1841. Colonel Byrd is one of the 
most brilliant figures of colonial Virginia, and a type of the 
Old Virginia gentleman. He had been sent to England for 
his education, where he was admitted to the bar of the 
Middle Temple, elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and 
formed an intimate friendship with Charles Boyle, the Earl 
of Orrery. He held many ofiices in the government of the 
colony, and founded the cities of Richmond and I*etersburg. 
His estates were large, and at Westover — where he had one of 



The Colonial Period. 17 

the finest private libraries in America — he exercised a baronial 
hospitality, blending the usual profusion of plantation life 
with the elegance of a traveled scholar and " picked man of 
countries." Colonel Byrd was rather an amateur in litera- 
ture. His Illstorij of the Dividmg Line is written with a 
jocularity which rises occasionally into real humor, and whicli 
gives to the painful journey through the wilderness the air 
of a holiday expedition. Similar in tone were his diaries of 
A Progress to the Mines and A Journey to the Land of Eden 
in North Carolina. 

The first formal historian of Virginia was Robert Beverly, 
" a native and inhabitant of the place," whose History of 
Virginia was printed at London in 1705. Beverly was a 
rich planter and large slave-owner, who, being in London 
in 1703, was shown by his bookseller the manuscript of a 
forthcoming work, Oldmixon's British Empire in America. 
Beverly was set upon writing his history by the inaccura- 
cies in this, and likewise because the province " has been so 
misrepresented to the common people of England as to make 
them believe that the servants in Virginia are made to draw 
in cart and plow, and that the country turns all people 
black " — an impression which lingers still in parts of Europe. 
The most original portions of the book are those in which 
the author puts down his personal observations of the plants 
and animals of the New World, and particularly the account 
of the Indians, to which his third book is devoted, and which 
is accompanied by valuable plates, Beverly's kno?/ Ve of 
these matters was evidently at first hand, and his descriptions 
here are very fresh and interesting. The more strictly his- 
torical part of his work is not free from prejudice and inac- 
curacy. A more critical, detailed, and impartial, but much 
less readable, work was William Stith's History of the First 
Discovery and Settlement of Virginia,ll4:7, which brought the 
subject down only to the year 1624. Stith was a clergyman, 
and at one time a professor in William and Mary College. 



18 Initial Studies in Ameeican Letters. 

The Virginians were stanch royalists and churchmefi. 
The Church of England was established by law, and non- 
conformity was persecuted in various ways. Three mis- 
sionaries were sent to the colony in 1642 by the Puritans of 
New England, two from Braintree, Massachusetts, and one 
from New Haven, They were not suffered to preach, but 
many resorted to them in private houses, until, being finally 
driven out by lines and imprisonments, they took refuge in 
Catholic Maryland. The Virginia clergy Avere not, as a 
body, very much of a force in education or literature. Many 
of them, by reason of the scattering and dispersed condition 
of their parishes, lived as domestic chajilains with the 
wealthier planters, and partook of their illiteracy and their 
passion for gaming and hunting. Few of them inher- 
ited the zeal of Alexander Whitaker, the " Apostle of 
Virginia," who came over in 1611 to preach to the col- 
onists and convert the Indians, and who published in fur- 
therance of those ends Good JVeios from Virginia, in 1613, 
three years before his death by drowning in the James 
River. 

The conditions were much more favorable for the pro- 
duction of a literature in New England than in the southern 
colonies. The free and genial existence of the " Old Domin- 
ion " had no counterpart among the settlers of Plymouth 
and Massachusetts Bay, and the Puritans must have been 
rather unpleasant people to live with for persons of a differ- 
ent way of thinking. But their intensity of character, their 
respect for learning, and the heroic mood which sustained 
them through the hardshi2)S and dangers of their great en- 
terprise are amply reflected in their own writings. If these 
are not so much literature as the raw materials of literature, 
they have at least been fortunate in finding interpreters 
among their descendants, and no modern Virginian has done 
for the memory of the Jamestown planters what Hawthorne, 
Whittier, Longfellow, and others have done in casting the 



The Colonial Pekiod. 19 

glamour of poetry and romance over the lives of the founders 
of New England. 

Cotton Mather, in his Magnolia^ quotes the following 
passage from one of those election sermons, delivered before 
the General Court of Massachusetts, which formed for many 
years the great annual intellectual event of the colony: 
" The question Avas often put unto our predecessors. What 
loent ye out into the vrilderness to see ? And the answer to 
it is not only too excellent but too notorious to bo dis- 
sembled. . . . We came hither because we would have our 
posterity settled under the pure and full dispensations of the 
Gospel, defended by rulers that should be of ourselves." 
The New England colonies were, in fact, theocracies. 
Their leaders were clergymen, or laymen whose zeal for the 
faith was no whit inferior to that of the ministers them- 
selves. Church and State were one. The freeman's oath 
was only administered to church members, and there was 
no place in the social system for unbelievers or dissenters. 
The pilgrim fathers regarded their transplantation to the 
New World as an exile, and nothing is more touching in their 
written records than the repeated expressions of love and 
longing toward the old home which they had left, and even 
toward that Church of England from which they had sor- 
rowfully separated themselves. It was not in any light or 
adventurous spirit that they faced the perils of the sea and 
the wilderness. *' This howling wilderness," " these ends of 
the earth," " these goings down of the sun," are some of the 
epithets which they constantly applied to the land of their 
exile. Nevertheless they had come to stay, and, unlike 
Smith and Percy and Sandys, the early historians and writ- 
ei's of New England cast in their lots permanently with the 
new settlements, A few, indeed, went back after 1640 — 
Mather says some ten or twelve of the ministers of the first 
" classis " or immigration were among them — when the vic- 
tory of the Puritanic party in Parliament opened a career 



20 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

for them in England, and made their presence there seem 
in some cases a duty. The celebrated Hugh Peters, for ex- 
ample, who Avas afterward Oliver Cromwell's chaplain, and 
was beheaded after the Restoration, went back in 1641, and 
in 1647 Nathaniel Ward, the minister of Ipswich, Massachu- 
setts, and author of a quaint book against toleration, entitled 
The Simple Cobbler of Agawam, written in America and 
published shortly after its author's arrival in England. 
The civil war, too, put a stop to further emigration from 
England until after the Restoration in 1660. 

The mass of the Puritan immigration consisted of men of 
the middle, class, artisans and husbandmen, the most useful 
members of a new colony. But their leaders were clergy- 
men educated at the universities, and especially at Emmanuel 
College, Cambridge, the great Puritan college; their civil 
magistrates were also in great part gentlemen of education 
and substance, like the elder Winthrop, who was learned in 
law, and Theophilus Eaton, first governor of New Haven, 
who was a London merchant of good estate. It is computed 
that there were in New England during the first generation 
as many university graduates as in any community of equal 
population in the old country. Almost the first care of the 
settlers was to establish schools. Every town of fifty fam- 
ilies was required by law to maintain a common school, and 
every town of a hundred families a grammar or Latin school. 
In 1636, only sixteen years after the landing of the Pilgrims 
on Plymouth Rock, Harvard College was founded at New- 
town, whose name was thereupon changed to Cambridge, 
the General Court held at Boston on September 8, 1630, 
having already advanced £400 "byway of essay towards 
the building of something to begin a college." " An uni- 
versity," says Mather, "which hath been to these planta- 
tions, for the good literature there cultivated, sal Gentium^ 
. . . and a river without the streams whereof these regions 
would have been mere unwatered places for the devil." By 



The Colonial Period. Si 

1701 Harvard had put forth a vigorous offshoot, Yale Col- 
lege, at New Haven, the settlers of New Haven and Con- 
necticut plantations having increased sufficiently to need a 
college at their own doors. A printing-press was set up at 
Cambridge in 1639, which was under the oversight of the 
university authorities, and afterward of licensers appointed 
by the civil power. The press was no more free in Massa- 
chusetts than in Virginia, and that "liberty of unlicensed 
printing " for which the Puritan Milton had pleaded in his 
Areopccffitica, in 1644, was unknown in Puritan New En- 
gland until some twenty years before the outbreak of the 
Revolutionary War. " The Freeman's Oath " and an almanac 
were issued from the Cambridge press in 1639, and in 1640 
the first English book printed in America, a collection of 
the psalms in meter, made by various ministers, and known 
as the J^a^ Psahn Book. The poetry of this version was ,i 
worse, if possible, than that of Sternhold and Hopkins's 
famous rendering ; but it is noteworthy that one of the 
principal ti'anslators was that devoted " Apostle to the In- 
dians," the Rev. John Eliot, who, in 1661-63, translated the 
Bible into the Algonquin tongue. Eliot hoped and toiled a 
life-time for the conversion of those " salvages," " tawnies," 
" devil-worshijDers," for whom our early writei's have usu- 
ally nothing but bad words. They have been destroyed 
instead of converted; but his (so entitled) Mamusse Wun- 
neetupanatamtoe Up-JBiblum God naneeswe Nuhkone Testa- 
ment hah wonJc Wicsku Testament — the first Bible printed in 
America — i-emains a monument of missionary zeal and a 
work of great value to students of the Indian languages. 

A modern writer has said that, to one looking back on the 
history of old New England, it seems as though the sun 
shone but dimly there, and the landscape was always dark 
and wintry. Such is the impression which one carries away 
from the perusal of books like Bradford's and Winthrop's 
Journals, or IVIather's 'Wb?iders of the Invisible World — an 



22 Initial Studies ik American Letters. 

impression of gloom, of night and cold, of mysterious fears 
besieging the infant settlements scattered in a narrow fringe 
" between the groaning forest and the shore." The Indian 
terror hung over New England for more than half a century, 
or ixntil the issue of King Philip's War, in 1676, relieved 
the colonists of any danger of a general massacre. Added 
to this were the perplexities caused by the earnest resolve of 
the settlers to keep their New-England Eden free from the 
intrusion of the serpent in the shape of heretical sects in re- 
ligion. The Puritanism of Massachusetts was an orthodox 
and conservative Puritanism. The later and more grotesque 
out-crops of the movement in the old England found no 
toleration in the new. But these refugees for conscience' 
sake were compelled in turn to persecute Antinomians, 
Separatists, Familists, Libertines, Anti-pedobaptists, and 
later, Quakers, and still later. Enthusiasts, who swarmed 
into their precincts and troubled the churches with 
" prophesyings " and novel opinions. Some of these were 
l)anished, others were flogged or imprisoned, and a few 
were put to death. Of the exiles the most noteworthy was 
Roger Williams, an impetuous, warm-hearted man, Avho was 
so far in advance of his age as to deny the power of the civil 
magistrate in cases of conscience, or who, in other words, 
maintained the modern doctrine of the separation of Church 
and State. Williams was driven away from the Massachu- 
setts colony — where he had been minister of the church at 
Salem — and with a few followers fled into the southern 
wilderness and settled at Providence. There, and in the 
neighboring plantation of Rhode Island, for which he ob- 
tained a charter, he established his patriarchal rule and gave 
freedom of worship to all comers. Williams was a prolific 
writer on theological subjects, the most important of his 
writings being, perhaps, his Bloody Tenent of Persecution, 
1644, and a supplement to the same called out by a reply to 
the former work from the pen of Mr. John Cotton, minister 



The Colonial Period. 23 

of the First Church nt Boston, entitled The Bloody Tenent 
Washed and made White in. the Blood of the Lamb. Will- 
iams was also a friend to the Indians, whose lands, he 
thought, should not be taken from them without payment, 
and he anticipated Eliot by writing, in 1643, a Key into the 
Language of America. Although at odds with the theology 
of Massachusetts Bay, Williams remained in correspondence 
with Winthrop and others in Boston, by whom he was highly 
esteemed. He visited England in 1643 and 1652, and made 
the acquaintance of John Milton. 

Besides the threat of an Indian M^ar and their anxious 
concern for the purity of the Gospel in their chui'ches, the 
colonists were haunted by superstitious forebodings of the 
darkest kind. It seemed to them that Satan, angered by 
the setting up of the kingdom of the saints in America, had 
" come down in great wrath," and was present among them, 
sometimes even in visible shape, to terrify and tempt. Spe- 
cial providences and unusual phenomena, like earthquakes, 
mirages, and the northern lights, are gravely recorded by 
Winthrop and Mather and others as portents of supernatural 
persecutions. Thus Mrs. Anne Hutchinson, the celebrated 
leader of the Familists, having, according to rumor, been de- 
livered of a monstrous,i)irth, the Rev. John Cotton, in open 
assembly, at Boston, upon a lecture day, " thereupon gath- 
ered that it might signify her error in denying inherent 
righteousness." " There will be an unusual range of the 
devil among us," wrote Mather, " a little before the second 
coming of our Lord. The evening wolves will be much 
abroad when \^e are near the evening of the world." This 
belief culminated in the horrible witchcraft delusion at Salem 
in 1692, that "spectral puppet play," which, beginning with 
the malicious pranks of a few children who accused certain 
uncanny old women and other persons of mean condition 
and suspected lives of having tormented them with magic, 
gradually drew into its vortex victims of the highest char- 



24 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

acter, and resulted in the judicial murder of over nineteen 
people. Many of the possessed jDretended to have been 
visited by the apparition of a little black man, who urged 
them to inscribe their names in a red book which he carried 
— a sort of muster-roll of those who had forsworn God's 
service for the devil's. Others testified to having been pres- 
ent at meetings of witches in the forest. It is difficult now 
to read without contempt the " evidence " which grave jus- 
tices and learned divines considered sufficient to condemn to 
death men and women of unblemished lives. It is true that 
the belief in witchcraft was general at tliat time all over the 
civilized world, and that sporadic cases of witch-burnings had 
occurred in different parts of America and Europe. Sir 
Tliomas Browne, in his Meligio Medici, 1635, affirmed his 
belief in Avitches, and j^ronounced those who doubted of 
them " a sort of atheist." But the superstition came to a 
head in the Salem trials and executions, and was the more 
shocking from the general high level of intelligence in the 
community in which these were held. It would be well if 
those who lament the decay of " faith " would remember 
what things were done in New England in the name of faith 
less than two hundred years ago. It is not wonderful that, 
to the Massachusetts Puritans of the seventeenth century, 
the mysterious forest held no beautiful suggestion; to them 
it was simply a grim and hideous wilderness, whose dark 
aisles were the ambush of prowling savages and the ren- 
dezvous of those other " devil-Avorshipers " who celebrated 
there a kind of vulgar Walpurgis night. 

The most important of original sources for the history of 
the settlement of New England are the journals of William 
Bradford, first governor of Plymouth, and John Winthrop, 
the second governor of Massachusetts, which hold a place 
corresponding to the writings of Captain John Smith in the 
Virginia colony, but are much more sober and trustworth3^ 
Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation covers the period 



The Colonial Period. 25 

from 1620 to 1646. The manuscript was used by later an- 
nalists, but remained unpublished, as a whole, until 1855, 
bavins^ been lost durinsc the War of the Revolution and recov- 
ered long afterward in England. Winthrop's Journal, or 
History of New England, begun on shipboard in 1630, and 
extending to 1649, was not published entire until 1826. It 
is of equal authority with Bradford's, and perhaps, on the 
whole, the more important of the two, as the colony of Mas- 
sachusetts Bay, whose history it narrates, greatly outwent 
Plymouth in wealth and population, though not in priority 
of settlement. The interest of Winthrop's Journal lies in 
the events that it records rather than in any charm in the 
historian's manner of recording them. His style is prag- 
matic, and some of the incidents which he gravely notes are 
trivial to the modern mind, though instructive as to our fore- 
fatliers' way of thinking. For instance, of the year 1632: 
"At Watertown there was (in the view of divers witnesses) 
a great combat between a mouse and a snake, and after a 
long fight the mouse prevailed and killed the snake. The 
pastor of Boston, Mr. Wilson, a very sincere, holy man, hear- 
ing of it, gave this interpretation: that the snake was the 
devil, the mouse was a poor, contemptible people, which God 
had brought hither, which should overcome Satan here and 
dispossess him of his kingdom." The reader of Winthrop's 
Journal comes every-where upon hints which the imag- 
ination has since shaped into poetry and romance. The 
germs of many of Longfellow's New England Tragedies, of 
Hawthorne's Maypole of Merry mount, and EndicotCs Red 
Cross, and of Whittier's John XInderhill and The Eamilists' 
Hymn are all to be found in some dry, brief entry of the old 
Puritan diarist. "Robert Cole, having been oft punished 
for drunkenness, was now ordered to wear a red D about his 
neck for a year," to wit, the year 1633, and thereby gave occa- 
sion to the greatest American romance, The Scarlet Letter. 
The famous apparition of the phantom ship in New Haven 



20 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

harbor, " upon the top of the poop a man standing with one 
hand akimbo under his left side, and in his right hand a 
sword stretched out tow^ard the sea," was first chronicled by 
Winthrop under the year 1648. This meteorological phenom- 
enon took on the dimensions of a full-grown myth some forty 
years later, as related, with many embellishments, by Rev. 
James Pierpont, of New Haven, in a letter to Cotton Mather. 
Winthrop put great faith in special j)rovidences, and among 
other instances narrates, not without a certain grim satisfac- 
tion, how " the Mary Rose, a ship of Bristol, of about 200 
tons," lying before Charleston, was blown in pieces with her 
own powder, being twenty-one barrels, wherein the judgment 
of God appeared, " for the master and company were many of 
them profane scoffers at us and at the ordinances of religion 
here." Without any effort at dramatic portraiture or char- 
acter-sketching, Winthrop managed in all simplicity, and by 
the plain relation of facts, to leave a clear impression of 
many prominent figures in the first Massachusetts immigra- 
tion. In particular there gradually arises from the entries 
in his diary a very distinct and diverting outline of Captain 
John Underhill, celebrated in Whittier's poem. He was one 
of the few professional soldiers who came over with the 
Puritan fathers, such as John Mason, the hero of the Pequot 
War, and Miles Standish, whose Courtship Longfellow sang. 
He had seen service in the Low Countries, and in pleading 
the privilege of his profession " he insisted much upon the 
liberty which all States do allow to military officers for free 
speech, etc., and that himself had spoken sometimes as freely 
to Count Nassau." Captain Underhill gave the colony 
no end of trouble, both by his scandalous living and his here- 
sies in religion. Having been seduced into Familistical opin- 
ions by Mrs. Anne Hutchinson, who was banished for her 
beliefs, he Avas had up before the General Court and ques- 
tioned, among other points, as to his own report of the man- 
ner of his conversion. " He had lain under a spirit of bondage 



The Colonial Period. 27 

and a legal way for years, and could get no assurance, till, 
at length, as he was taking a pipe of tobacco, the Spirit 
set home an absolute promise of free grace with such assur- 
ance and joy as he never since doubted of his good estate, 
neither should he, though he should fall into sin. . . . The 
Lord's day following he made a speech in the assembly, 
showing that as the Lord was pleased to convert Paul as he 
was in persecuting, etc., so he might manifest himself to him 
as he was taking the moderate use of the creature called 
tobacco." The gallant captain, being banished the colony, 
betook himself to the falls of the Piscataquack (Exeter, N.H.), 
where the Rev. John Wheelwright, another adherent of 
Mrs. Hutchinson, had gathered a congregation. Being made 
governor of this plantation, Underhill sent letters to the 
Massachusetts magistrates, breathing reproaches and impre- 
cations of vengeance. But meanwhile it was discovered that 
he had been living in adultery at Boston with a young 
woman whom he had seduced, the wife of a cooper, and the 
captain was forced to make public confession, which he did 
with great unction and in a manner highly dramatic. " He 
came in his worst clothes (being accustomed to take great 
pride in his bravery and neatness), without a band, in a foul 
linen cap, and pulled close to his eyes, and standing upon a 
form, he did, with many deep sighs and abundance of tears, 
lay open his wicked course." There is a lurking humor in 
the grave Winthrop's detailed account of Underhill's doings. 
Winthrop's own personality comes out well in his Journal. 
He was a born leader of men, a condltor imperii, just, mod- 
erate, patient, wise; and bis narrative gives, upon the whole, 
a favorable impression of the general prudence and fair- 
mindedness of the Massachusetts settlers in their dealings 
with one another, with the Indians, and with the neighboring 
plantations. 

Considering our forefathers' errand and calling into this 
wilderness, it is not strange that their chief literary staples 



28 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

were sermons and tracts in controversial theology. Multi- 
tudes of these were written and published by the divines of 
the first generation, such as John Cotton, Thomas Shepard, 
John Norton, Peter Bulkley, and Thomas Hooker, the 
founder of Hartford, of whom it was finely said that " when 
he was doing his Master's business he would put a king into 
his pocket." Nor were their successors in the second or the 
third generation any less industrious and prolific. They rest 
from their labors and their works do follow them. Their 
sermons and theological treatises are not literature: they are 
for the most part dry, heavy, and dogmatic, but they exhibit 
great learning, logical acuteness, and an earnestness which 
sometimes rises into eloquence. The pulpit ruled New En- 
gland, and the sermon was the great intellectual engine of 
the time. The serious thinking of the Puritans was given 
almost exclusively to religion; the other world was all their 
art. The daily secular events of life, the aspects of nature, 
the vicissitude of the seasons, were important enough to find 
record in print only in so far as they manifested God's deal- 
ings with his people. So much was the sermon depended 
upon to furnish literary food that it was the general custom 
of serious-minded laymen to take down the words of the dis- 
course in their note-books. Franklin, in his Autohiogi'Ciphy, 
describes this as the constant habit of his grandfathei-, Peter 
Folger; and Mather, in his life of the elder Winthrop, says 
that " tho' he wrote not after the preacher, yet such was his 
attention and such his retention in hearing, that he repeated 
unto his family the sermons which he had heard in the con- 
gregation." These discourses were commonly of great 
length; twice, or sometimes thrice, the pulpit hour-glass was 
silently inverted while the orator pursued his theme even 
unto " fourteenthly." 

The book which best sums up the life and thought of this 
old New England of the seventeenth century is Cotton 
Mather's Magnolia Christi Americana. Mather was by 



The Coloxial Period. 29 

birth a member of that clerical ai'istocracy which developed 
later into Dr. Holmes's " Brahmin Caste of New England." 
His maternal grandfather was John Cotton. His father was 
Increase Mather, the most learned divine of his generation 
in New England, minister of the North Church of Boston, 
President of Harvard College, and author, inter alia, of that 
characteristically Puritan book. An Essay for the Recording 
of Illustrious Providences. Cotton Mather himself was a 
monster of erudition and a prodigy of diligence. He was 
graduated from Harvard at fifteen. He ordered his daily 
life and conversation by a system of minute observances. 
He was a book-worm, whose life was spent between his 
library and his pulpit, and his published works number 
upward of three hundred and eighty. Of these the most 
important is the Magnalia, 1702, an ecclesiastical history of 
New England from 1620 to 1698, divided into seven parts: 
I. Antiquities; H. Lives of the Governors; IH. Lives of 
Sixty Famous Divines; IV. A History of Harvard College, 
with biographies of its eminent graduates ; V. Acts and 
Monuments of the Faith ; VI. Wonderfixl Providences ; 
VII. The Wars of the Lord — that is, an account of the Afflic- 
tions and Disturbances of the Churches and the Conflicts 
with the Indians. The plan of the work thus united that 
of Fuller's Worthies of England and Church History with 
that of Wood's Athence Oxonienses and Fox's Hook of 
Martyrs. 

Mather's prose was of the kind which the English Com- 
monwealth writers used. He was younger by a generation 
than Dryden ; but, as literary fashions are slower to cliange 
in a colony than in the mother-country, that nimble English 
which Dryden and the Restoration essayists inti-oduced had 
not yet displaced in New England the older manner. Mather 
wrote in the full and pregnant style of Taylor, Milton, 
Brown, Fuller, and Burton, a style ponderous with learning 
and stiff with allusions, digressions, conceits, anecdotes, and 



30 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

quotations from the Greek and the Latin. A page of the 
Magnolia is almost as richly mottled with italics as one from 
the Anatomy of Melancholy, and the quaintness which 
Mather caught from his favorite Fuller disports itself in 
textual pun and marginal anagram and the fantastic sub- 
titles of his books and cha|)ters. He speaks of Thomas 
Hooker as having " angled many scores of souls into 
the kingdom of heaven," anagrammatizes Mrs, Hutchin- 
son's surnam e into 'Hhe nm i-such;" and having occasion 
to f>peak of (Mr. Urian Oakes^ election to the presidency 
of Harvard College, enlarges upon the circumstance as 
follows: 

• " We all know that Britain knew nothing more famous 
than their ancient sect of DRUIDS ; the philosophers, 
whose order, they say, was instituted by one Samothes, 
Avhich is in English as much as to say, an heavenly man. 
The Celtic name, Dera, for an Oak was that from whence 
they received their denomination; as at this very day the 

Welch call this tree Dreto, and this order of men Derwyd- 
don. But there are no small antiquaries who derive this oaken 
religion and jjhilosophy from the Oaks of Mamre, where the 
Patriarch Abraham had as well a dwelling as an cdtar. That 

Oaken-Plain and the eminent OAK under which Abraham 
lodged was extant in the days of Constantine, as Isidore, 
Jerom, and Sozometi have assured us. Yea, there are shrewd 
probabilities that JVoah himself had lived in this very Oak- 
plain before him; for this very place was called Oyy?/, which 
was the name of Noah, so styled fiom tlie Oggyan (subcin- 
eritiis panibus) sacrifices, which he did use to offer in tliis 
renowned Grove. And it was from this example that the 
ancients, and particularly that the Druids of the nations, 
chose oaken retirements for their studies. Reader, let us 
now, upon another account, behold the students of Harvard 

College, as a rendezvous of happy Druids, under the influ- 
ences of so rare a president. But, alas ! our joy must be 



The Colonial Period. 31 

short-lived, for on Julij 25, 1681, the stroke of a sudden 
death felled the tree, 

" Qui tautura inter caput extulit onuies 
Quantum leiita solent inter viberna cypressi. 

Mr. Oakes thus being transplanted into the better world the 
presidentship Avas immediately tendered unto 3Ir, Increase 
Mather:' 

This Avill suffice as an example of the bad taste and labo- 
rious pedantry which disfigured Mather's writing. In its 
substance the book is a perfect thesaurus; and inasmuch as 
nothing is imimportant in the history of the beginnings of 
such a nation as this is and is destined to be, the Magnalla 
will always remain a valuable and interesting work. Cotton 
Mather, born in 1663, was of the second generation of Amer- 
icans, his grandfather being of the immigration, but his fa- 
ther a native of Dorchester, Mass. A comparison of his 
writings and of the writings of his contemporaries with the 
Avorks of Bradford, AVinthrop, Hooker, and others of the 
original colonists, shows that the simple and heroic faith of 
the Pilgrims had hardened into formalism and doctrinal 
rigidity. The leaders of the Puritan exodus, notwithstand- 
ing their intolerance of errors in belief, were comparatively 
broad-minded men. They were sharers in a great national 
movement, and they came over Avlien their cause was Avarm 
Avith the gloAV of martyrdom and on the eve of its coming 
triumph at home. After the Restoration, in 1660, the cur- 
rents of national feeling no longer circulated so fi-eely 
through this distant member of the body politic, and thought 
in America became more provincial. The English dissent- 
ers, though socially at a disadvantage as compared with the 
Church of England, liad the great benefit of living at the 
center of national life, and of feeling about them the press- 
ure of vast bodies of people Avho did not think as they did. 
In New England, for many generations, the dominant sect 



32 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

had things all its own way — a condition of things which is 
not healthy for any sect or party. Hence Mather and the 
divines of his time appear in their writings very much like 
so many Puritan bishops, jealous of their prerogatives, mag- 
nifying their apostolate, and careful to maintain their au- 
thority over the laity. Mather had an appetite for the 
marvelous, and took a leading part in the witchcraft 
trials, of which he gave an account in his Wonders of the 
Invisible World, 1693. To the quaint pages of the Mag- 
nalia our modern authors have resorted as to a collection 
of romances or fairy tales. Whittier, for example, took 
from thence the subject of his poem The Garrison of Cape 
Anne; and Hawthorne embodied in Grandfather'' s Chair 
the most elaborate of Mather's biographies. This was the 
life of Sir William Phipps, who, from being a poor shep- 
herd boy in his native province of Maine, rose to be the 
royal governor of Massachusetts, and the story of whose 
wonderful adventures in raising the freight of a Spanish 
ship, sunk on a reef near Port de la Plata, reads less like 
sober fact than like some ancient fable, with talk of the 
Spanish main, bullion, and plate and jewels and "pieces 
of eight." 

Of Mather's generation was Samuel Sewall, Chief-Justice 
of Massachusetts, a singularly gracious and venerable figure, 
who is intimately known through his Diary, kept from 1673 
to 1729. This has been compared with the more famous 
diary of Samuel Pepys, which it resembles in its confidential 
character and the completeness of its self -revelation, but to 
which it is as much inferior in historic interest as " the petty 
province here " was inferior in political and social importance 
to " Britain far away." For the most part it is a chronicle of 
small beer, the diarist jotting down the minutiae of his do- 
mestic life and private affairs, even to the recording of such 
haps as this: "March 23, I had my hair cut by G. Barret." 
But it also affords instructive glimpses of public events, 



The Colonial Period. 33 

such as King Philip's War, the Quaker troubles, the English 
Revolution of 1688, etc. It bears about the same relation to 
New England history at the close of the seventeenth century 
as Bradford's and Winthrop's Journals bear to that of the 
first generation. Sewall was one of the justices who pre- 
sided at the trial of the Salem witches ; but for the part 
which he took in that wretched affair he made such atone- 
ment as was possible, by open confession of his mistake and 
his remorse in the presence of the Church. Sewall was one 
of the first writers against African slavery, in his brief tract, 
The Selling of Joseph, printed at Boston in 1700. His Phe- 
nomena Qumdarn Apocalyptica, a mystical interpretation of 
prophecies concerning the New Jerusalem, which he identi- 
fies with America, is remembered only because Whittier, in 
his Prophecy of Samuel Seioall, has paraphrased one poetic 
passage which shows a loving observation of nature very rare 
in our colonial writers. 

Of poetry, indeed, or, in fact, of pure literature, in the nar- 
rower sense — that is, of the imaginative representation of 
life — there was little or none in the colonial period. There 
were no novels, no plays, no satires, and — until the example 
of the Spectator had begun to work on this side the water — 
no experiments even at the lighter forms of essay-writing, 
character-sketches, and literary criticism. There was verse 
of a certain kind, but the most generous stretch of the term 
would hardly allow it to be called poetry. Many of the early 
divines of New England relieved their pens, in the intervals 
of sermon-writing, of epigrams, elegies, eulogistic verses, and 
similar grave trifles distinguished by the crabbed wit of the 
so-called " metaphysical poets," whose manner was in fashion 
when the Puritans left England; the manner of Donne and 
Cowley, and those darlings of the New-English muse, the 
Emblems of Quarles and the Divine Week of Du Bartas, as 
translated by Sylvester. The Magnolia contains a number 
of these things in Latin and English, and is itself well bol- 
3 



34 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

stered with comjjlimentaiy introductions in meter l)y tlie 
author's friends. For example : 

CoTTOxius Matherus. 

ANAGRAM. 

Tuos Tecum Ornasti. 
" While thus the dead in thy rare pages rise 
Thine, vjith thyself thou dost immortalize. 
To view the odds thy learned lives invite 
'Twixt Eleutherian and Edomite. 
But all succeeding ages shall despair 
A fitting monument for thee to 7-ear. 
Thy own rich pen (peace, silly Momus, peace!) 
Hath given them a lasting writ of ease" 

' The epitaphs and mortuary verses were especially ingenious 
in the matter of jiuns, anagrams, and similar conceits. The 
death of the Rev. Samuel Stone, of Hartford, afforded an 
oj)portunity of this sort not to be missed, and his threnodist 
accordingly celebrated him as a " whetstone," a " loadstone," 
an " Ebenezer " — 

" A stoue for kingly David's use so fit 

As would not fail Goliath's front to hit," etc. 

The most characteristic, popular, and widely circulated 
poem of colonial New England was Michael Wigglesworth's 
Day of Doom (1G02), a kind of doggerel Inferno, which 
went through nine editions, and "was the solace," says 
Lowell, " of^ every fireside, the flicker of the pine-knots by 
which it was conned perhaps adding a livelier relish to its 
premonitions of eternal combustion." Wigglesworth had 
not the technical equipment of a poet. His verse is sing- 
song, his language rude and monotonous, and the lurid hor- 
I'ors of his material hell are more likely to move mirth than 
fear in a modern reader. But there are an unmistakable 
vigor of imagination and a sincerity of belief in his gloomy 
poem which hold it far above contempt, and easily account 
for its universal currency among a people like the Puritans. 



The Colonial Pekiod. 35 

One stanza has been often quoted for its grim concession 
to unregenerate infants of " the easiest room in hell " — 
a Ihnhm infaiituni wliich even Origen need not have 
scrupled at. 

The most authoritative expounder of New England Cal- 
vinism was Jonathan Edwards (1703-58), a native of Con- 
necticut and a graduate of Yale, who was minister for more 
than twenty years over the church in Northampton, Mass., 
afterward missionary to the Stockbridge Indians, and at the 
time of his death had just been inaugurated president of 
Princeton College. By virtue of his Inquiri) into the Free- 
dom of the Will, 1754, Edwards holds rank as the subtlest 
metaphysician of his age. This treatise was composed to 
justify, on philosophical grounds, the Calvinistic doctrines 
of fore-ordination and election by grace, though its arguments 
are curiously coincident with those of the scientific necessita- 
rians, whose conclusions are as far asunder from Edwards's 
*' as from the center thrice to the utmost pole." His writings 
belong to theology rather than to literature, but there is an 
intensity and a spii-itual elevation about them, apart from the 
profundity and acuteness of the thought, which lift them 
here and there into the finer ether of purely emotional or 
imaginative art. He dwelt rather upon the terrors than the 
comfort of the word, and his chosen themes were the dog- 
mas of predestination, original sin, total depravity, and 
eternal punishment. The titles of his sermons are signifi- 
cant: Men Naturallt/ GocVs Enemies, Wrath upon the Wicked 
to the Uttermost, The Final Judgment, etc. "A natural 
man," he wrote in the first of these discourses, *'has a heart 
like the heart of a devil. . . . The heart of a natural man 
is as destitute of love to God as a dead, stiff, cold corj^se is of 
vital heat." Perhaps the most famous of Edwards's sermons 
was Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, preached at 
Enfield, Conn., July 8, 1741, " at a time of great awakenings," 
and upon the ominous text, Their foot shall slide in due time. 



36 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

"The God that holds you over the pit of hell," runs an oft- 
quoted passage from this powerful denunciation of the wrath 
to come, "much as one holds a spider or some loathsome 
insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked. 
. . . You are ten thousand times more abominable in his 
eyes than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. . . . 
You hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath 
flashing about it. . . . If you cry to God to pity you he will 
be so far from pitying you in your doleful case that he will 
only tread you under foot. . . . He will crush out your blood 
and make it fly, and it shall be sprinkled on his garments so 
as to stain all his raiment." But Edwards was a rapt soul, 
possessed with the love as Avell as the fear of the God, and 
there are passages of sweet and exalted feeling in his Trea- 
tise Concerning Religious Affections, 1746. Such is his por- 
trait of Sarah Pierpont, "a young lady in New Haven," who 
afterward became his wife and who " will sometimes go 
about from place to place singing sweetly, and no one knows 
for what. She loves to be alone, walking in the fields and 
groves, and seems to have some one invisible always convers- 
ing with her." Edwards's 2:)rinted works number thirty-six 
titles. A complete edition of them in ten volumes was pub- 
lished in 1829 by his great grandson, Sereno Dwight. The 
memoranda from Edwards's note-books, quoted by his editor 
and biographer, exhibit a remarkable precocity. Even as a 
school-boy and a college student he had made deep guesses 
in physics as well as metaphysics, and, as might have been 
predicted of a youth of his philosopliical insight and ideal 
cast of mind, he had eai-ly anticipated Berkeley in denying 
the existence of matter. In passing from Mather toEdw^ards 
we step from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century. 
There is the same difference between them in style and turn 
of thought as between Milton and Locke, or between Fuller 
and Dryden. The learned digressions, the witty conceits, 
the perpetual interlarding of the text with scraps of Latin, 



The Colonial Period. 37 

have fallen off, even as the full-bottomed wig and the cler- 
ical gown and bands have been laid aside for the undistin- 
guishing dress of the modern minister. In Edwards's English 
all is simple, precise, direct, and business-like. 

Benjamin Franklin (1706-90), who was strictly contem- 
porary with Edwards, was a contrast to him in every respect. 
As Edwards represents the spirituality and other-Avorldliness 
of Puritanism, Franklin stands for the worldly and secular 
side of American character, and he illustrates the develop- 
ment of the New England Englishman into the modern 
Yankee. Clear rather than subtle, without ideality or ro- 
mance or fineness of emotion or poetic lift, intensely practi- 
cal and utilitarian, broad-minded, inventive, shrewd, versatile, 
Franklin's sturdy figure became typical of his time and his 
people. He was the first and the only man of letters in 
colonial America who acquired a cosmopolitan fame and im- 
pressed his characteristic Americanism uj^on the mind of 
Europe. He was the embodiment of common sense and of 
the useful virtues, with the enterprise but without the nerv- 
ousness of his modern compatriots, uniting the philosopher's 
openness of mind to the sagacity and quickness of resource of 
the self-made business man. He was representative also of his 
age, an age of aufklcirung, eclaircissement, or " clearing up." 
By the middle of the eighteenth century a change had taken 
place in American society. Trade had increased between 
the different colonies ; Boston, New York, and Philadelphia 
were considerable towns; democratic feeling was spreading; 
over forty newspapers Avere published in America at the out- 
break of the Revolution; politics claimed more attention 
than formerly, and theology less. With all this intercourse 
and mutual reaction of the various colonies upon one another, 
the isolated theocracy of New England naturally relaxed 
somewhat of its grip on the minds of the laity. When 
Franklin was a printer's appi-entice in Boston, setting type 
on his brother's Nev) England Courant^ the fourth American 



38 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

newspaper, he got hold of an odd volume of the Spectator, 
and formed his style upon Addison, whose manner he after- 
ward imitated in his Busy-Body papers in the Philadelphia 
Weekly Mercury. He also read Locke and the English deist- 
ical writers, Collins and Shaftesbury, and became himself a 
deist and free-thinker; and subsequently when j^racticing his 
trade in London, in 1724-26, he made the acquaintance of 
Dr. Mandeville, author of the Fahle of the Bees, at a pale- 
ale house in Cheapside, called " The Horns," where the famous 
free-thinker presided over a club of wits and boon compan- 
ions. Though a native of Boston, Franklin is identified with 
Philadelphia, whither he arrived in 1723, a runaway 'prentice 
boy, " "wdiose stock of cash consisted of a Dutch dollar and 
about a shilling in copper." The description in his Autohl- 
ography of his walking up Market Street munching a loaf 
of bread, and passing his future wife, standing on her father's 
doorstep, has become almost as familiar as the anecdote about 
Whittington and his cat. 

It was in the practical sphere that Franklin was greatest, 
as an originator and executor of projects for the general wel- 
fare. The list of his public services is almost endless. He 
organized the Philadelphia fire department and street-clean- 
ing service, and the colonial postal system Avhich grew into 
the United States Post Office Department. He started the 
Philadelphia public library, the American Philosophical So- 
ciety, the University of Pennsylvania, and the first American 
magazine, TJie General Magazine and Historical Chronicle,' 
so that he was almost singly the father of whatever intellect- 
ual life the Pennsylvania colony could boast. In 1754, when 
commissioners from the colonies met at Albany, Franklin 
proposed a plan, which was adopted, for the union of all 
the colonies under one government. But all these things, as 
well as his mission to England in 1757, on behalf of the 
Pennsylvania Assembly in its dispute with the proprietaries; 
his share in the Declaration of Independence — of which he 



The Colonial Period. 39 

was one of the signers — and his residence in France as em- 
bassador of the United Colonies, belong to the political 
history of the country; to the history of American science 
belong his celebrated experiments in electricity; and his 
benefits to mankind in both of these departments were 
aptly summed up in the famous epigram of the French 
statesman Turgot: 

^^ Eripuit coelo fulmtn sceptrumque tyraiinis." 

Franklin's success in Europe was such as no American had 
yet achieved, as few Americans since him have achieved. 
Hume and Voltaire were among his acquaintances and his 
professed admirers. In France he was fairly idolized, and 
when he died Mirabeau announced, " The genius which has 
freed America and poured a flood of light over Europe has 
returned to the bosom of the Divinity." 

Franklin was a great man, but hardly a great writer, though 
as a writer, too, he had many admirable and some great qual- 
ities. Among these were the crystal clearness and simplicity 
of his style. His more strictly literary performances, such 
as his essays after the Spectator, hardly rise above mediocrity, 
and are neither better nor worse than other imitations of 
Addison. But in some of his lighter bagatelles there are a 
homely wisdom and a charming playfulness which have won 
them enduring favor. Such are his famous story of the 
Whistle, his Dialogue between Franklin and the Gout, his 
letters to Madame Helvetius, and his verses entitled Paper. 
The greater portion of his writings consists of papers on gen- 
eral politics, commerce, and political economy, contributions 
to the public questions of his day. These are of the nature 
of journalism rather than of literature, and many of them 
were published in his newspaper, the Pennsyluania Gazette, 
the medium through which for many years he most strongly 
influenced American opinion. The most popular of his 
writings were his Autobiography and Poor MicharcVs Alma- 



40 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

nac. The former of these was begun in 1771, resumed in 
1788, but never completed. It has remained the most 
widely current book in our colonial literature. Poor Rich- 
ard's Almanac, begun in 1732 and continued for about 
twenty-five years, had an annual circulation of ten thou- 
sand copies. It was filled with proverbial sayings in 
prose and verse, inculcating the virtues of industry, honesty, 
and frugality.^ Some of these were original with Franklin, 
others were selected from the proverbial wisdom of the ages, 
but a new force was given them by pungent turns of expres- 
sion. Poor Richard's saws were such as these: "Little 
strokes fell great oaks;" "Three removes are as bad as a 
fire; " "Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, 
wealthy, and wise ; " " Never leave that till to-morrow which 
you can do to-day;" "What maintains one vice Avould bring 
up two children;" "It is hard for an empty bag to stand 
upright." 

Now and then there are truths of a higher kind than these 
in Franklin, and Sainte-Beuve, the great French critic, quotes, 
as an example of his occasional finer moods, the saying, 
"Truth and sincerity have a certain distinguishing native 
luster about them which cannot be counterfeited ; they are 
like fire and flame that cannot be painted." But the sage 
who invented the Franklin stove had no disdain of small util- 
ities; and in general the last word of his philosophy is well 
expressed in a passage of his Autobiography : " Human felic- 
ity is produced not so much by great pieces of good fortune, 
that seldom happen, as by little advantages that occur every 
day; thus, if you teach a poor young man to shave himself 
and keep his razor in order, you may conti'ibute more to 
the happiness of his life than in giving him a thousand 
guineas." 

' Tlie Way to Wealth, Plan for Saving One Ekndred Thousand Pounds, 
Rules of Health, Advice to a Young Tradesman, The Way to Make Money Plenty 
in Every Maris Pocket, etc. 



The Colonial Period. 41 

1. Captain John Smith. A True Relation of Virgiyda. 
Deane's edition. Boston: 1866. 

2. Cotton Mather. Magnalia Christi Americana. Hart- 
ford: 1820. 

3. Samuel Sewall. Diary. Massachusetts Historical Col- 
lections. Fifth Series. Vols, v, vi, and vii. Boston: 1878. 

4. Jonathan Edwards. Eight Sermons on Various Occa- 
sions. Vol. vii of Edwards's Works. Edited by Sereno 
Dwight. New York: 1829. 

5. Benjamin Franklin. Autobiography. Edited by John 
Bigelow. Philadelphia: 1869. [J. B. Lippincott & Co.] 

6. Essays and Bagatelles. Vol. ii of Franklin's Works. 
Edited by Jared Sparks. Boston: 1836. 

7. Moses Coit Tyler. A History of American Literature. 
1607^1765. New York: 1878. [G. P. Putnam's Sons.] 



42 Initial Studies in American Letters. 



CHAPTER II. 

THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD. 
1V65-1815. 

It will be convenient to treat the fifty years which elapsed 
between the meeting at New York, in 1765, of a Congress of 
delegates from nine colonies to protest against the Stamp 
Act, and the close of the second war with England, in 1815, 
as, for literary purposes, a single period. This half-century 
was the formative era of the American nation. Historically, 
it is divisible into the years of revolution and the years of 
construction. But the men who led the movement for inde- 
pendence were also, in great part, the same who guided in 
shaping the Constitution of the new republic, and the intel- 
lectual impress of the whole period is one and the same. The 
character of the age was as distinctly political as that of the co- 
lonial era — in New England at least — was theological ; and lit- 
erature must still continue to borrow its interest from history. 
Pure literature, or what, for want of a better term, we call 
belles lettres, was not born in America until the nineteenth 
century was well under way. It is true that the Revolution 
had its humor, its poetry, and even its fiction ; but these 
were strictly for the home market. They hardly penetrated 
the consciousness of Europe at all, and are not to be compared 
with the contemporary work of English authors like Cowper 
and Sheridan and Burke. Their importance for us to-day is 
rather antiquarian than literary, though the most noteworthy 
of them will be mentioned in due course in the present chap- 
ter. It is also true that one or two of Irving's early books fall 
within the last years of the period now under consideration. 



The Revoi.utioxary Period. 43 

But literary epochs overlap one another at the edges, and 
these writings may best be postponed to a subsequent 
chapter. 

Among the most characteristic products of the intellectual 
stir that preceded and accompanied the Revolutionary move- 
ment were the speeches of political orators like Samuel 
Adams, James Otis, and Josiah Quincy, in Massachusetts, 
and Patrick Henry in Virginia. Oratory is the art of a fi'ee 
people, and as in the forensic assemblies of Greece and Rome 
and in the Parliament of Great Britain, so in the conventions 
and congresses of Revolutionary America it sprang up and 
flourished naturally. The age, moreover, was an eloquent, 
not to say a rhetorical, age; and the influence of Johnson's 
orotund prose, of the declamatory Letters of Junius, and of 
the speeches of Burke, Fox, Sheridan, and the elder Pitt is 
perceptible in the debates of our early Congresses. The fame 
of a great orator, like that of a great actor, is largely tradition- 
ary. The spoken word transferred to the printed page loses 
the glow which resided in the man and the moment. A 
speech is good if it attains its aim, if it moves the hearers to 
the end which is sought. But the fact that this end is often 
temporary and occasional, rather than universal and perma- 
nent, explains why so few speeches are really literature. If 
this is true, even where the words of an orator are preserved 
exactly as they were spoken, it is doubly true when we have 
only the testimony of contemporaries as to the effect which 
the oi-ation produced. The fiery ittterances of Adams, Otis, 
apd Quincy were either not reported at all or very imper- 
fectly reported, so that posterity can judge of them only at 
second-hand. Patrick Henry has fared better, many of his 
orations being preserved in substance, if not in the letter, in 
Wirt's biography. Of these the most famous was the defiant 
speech in the Convention of Delegates, March 28, 1775, 
throwing down the gauge of battle to the British ministry. 
The ringing sentences of this challenge are still declaimed by 



44 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

school-boys, and many of them remain as familiar as house- 
hold words. " I have but one lamp by which my feet are 
guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no 
way of judging of the future but by the j^ast. . . . Gentle- 
men may cry peace, peace, but there is no peace. ... Is life 
so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of 
chains and slavery ? Forbid it, Almighty God ! I know not 
what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, 
or give me death ! " The eloquence of Patrick Henry was 
fervid rather than weighty or rich. But if such specimens 
of the oratory of the American patriots as have come down 
to us fail to account for the wonderful impression that their 
words are said to have produced upon their fellow-country- 
men, we should remember that they are at a disadvantage 
when read instead of heard. The imagination should supply 
all those accessories which gave them vitality when first pro- 
nounced — the living presence and voice of the speaker ; the 
listening Senate; the grave excitement of the hour and of the 
impending conflict. The wordiness and exaggeration ; the 
highly Latinized diction ; the rhapsodies about freedom which 
hundreds of Foui'th-of-July addresses have since turned into 
platitudes — all these coming hot from the lips of men whose 
actions in the field confirmed the earnestness of their speech 
— were effective in the crisis and for the purpose to which 
they were addressed. 

The press was an agent in the cause of liberty no less po- 
tent than the platform, and patriots such as Adams, Otis, 
Quincy, Warren, and Hancock wrote constantly, for the news- 
papers, essays and letters on the public questions of the time 
.signed "Vindex," "Hyperion," "Independent," "Brutus," 
" Cassius," and the like, and couched in language which to 
the taste of to-day seems rather over-rhetorical. Among the 
most important of these political essays were the Circular 
Letter to each Colonial Legidature, published by Adams and 
Otis in 1768; Quincy 's Observations on the Soslon Port Sill, 



Thk Rkvolutionary Period. 45 

IV 74, and Otis's MlgJits of the Brlilsh Colonies, a pamphlet 
of one hundred and twenty pages, pi'inted in 1764. No 
collection of Otis's writings has ever been made. The life 
of Quincy, published by his son, preserves for posterity his 
journals and correspondence, his newspaper essays, and his 
speeches at the bar, taken from the Massachusetts law 
reports. 

Among the political literature which is of perennial in- 
terest to the American people are such State documents as 
the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the 
United States, and the messages, inaugural addresses, and 
other writings of our early 2)residents. Thomas Jefferson, 
the third President of the United States, and the father of 
the Democratic party, was the author of the Declaration of 
Indej^endence, whose opening sentences have become com- 
monplaces in the memory of all readers. One sentence in 
particular has been as a shibboleth, or war-cry, or declara- 
tion of faith among Democrats of all shades of opinion: 
" We hold these truths to be self-evident — that all men are 
created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with 
certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, 
and the pursuit of happiness." Not so familiar to modern 
readers is the following, which an English historian of our 
literature calls "the most eloquent clause of that great doc- 
ument," and " the most interesting suppressed passage in 
American literature." Jefferson was a Southerner, but even 
at that early day the South had grown sensitive on the sub- 
ject of slavery, and Jefferson's arraignment of King George 
for promoting the " peculiar institution " was left out from 
the final draft of the Declaration in deference to Southern 
members. 

" He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, 
violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty, in the 
persons of a distant people who never offended him, cap- 
tivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemi- 



46 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

sphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation 
thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel 
powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great 
Britain. Determined to keep open a market where men 
should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative 
by suppressing every legislative attempt to restrain this 
execrable commerce. And, that this assemblage of horrors 
might want no fact of distinguished dye, he is now exciting 
those very people to rise in arms against us and purchase 
that liberty of which he deprived them by murdering the 
people upon whom he obtruded tliem, and thus paying ofl' 
former crimes committed against the liberties of one people 
by crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives 
of another." 

The tone of apology or defense which Calhoun and other 
Southern statesman afterward adopted on the subject of 
slavery Avas not taken by the men of Jefferson's generation. 
Another famous Virginian, John Randolph of Roanoke, him- 
self a slave-holder, in his speech on the militia bill in the 
House of Representatives, December 10, 1811, said : " I speak 
from facts when I say that the night-bell never tolls for 
fire in Richmond that the mother does not hug her infant 
more closely to her bosom." This was said apropos of the 
danger of a servile insurrection in the event of a war with 
England — a war which actually broke out in the year follow- 
ing, but was not attended with the slave-rising which Ran- 
dolph predicted. Randolph was a thorough-going "State 
rights" man, and, though opposed to slavery on principle, 
he cried " Hands off ! " to any interference by the general 
government with the domestic institutions of the States. 
His speeches read better than most of his contemporaries'. 
They are interesting in their exhibit of a bitter and eccen- 
tric individuality, witty, incisive, and expressed in a pungent 
and familiar style Avhich contrasts refreshingly with the 
diplomatic language and glittering generalities of most 



The Revolutionary Period. 47 

congressional oratory, whose verbiage seems to keep its sulj- 
ject always at arm's-length. 

Another noteworthy writing of Jefferson's was his In- 
augural Address of March 4, 1801, with its programme of 
"equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or 
persuasion, religious or political ; peace, commerce, and 
honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with 
none ; the support of the State governments in all their 
rights; . . . absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the 
majority; . . . the supremacy of the civil over the military 
authority; economy in the public expense; freedom of relig- 
ion, freedom of the press, and freedom of person under the 
protection of the habeas 6'0?7:>i<s, and trial by juries impar- 
tially selecteti." 

During his six years' residence in France, as American 
minister, Jefferson had become indoctrinated with the prin- 
ciples of French democracy. His main service and that of 
his party — the Democratic, or, as it was then called, the 
Republican party — to the young republic was in its insistence 
upon toleration of all beliefs and upon the freedom of the 
individual from all forms of governmental restraint. Jeffer- 
son has some claims to rank as an author in general litera- 
ture. Educated at William and Mary College in the old 
Virginia capital, Williamsburg, he became the founder of 
the LTniversity of Virginia, in which he made special pro- 
vision for the study of Anglo-Saxon, and in which the 
liberal scheme of instruction and discipline was conformed, 
in theory, at least, to the " university idea." His Notes on 
Virginia are not without literary quality, and one descrip- 
tion, in particular, has been often quoted — the passage of 
the Potomac through the Blue Ridge — in which is this 
poetically imaginative touch ; " The mountain being cloven 
asunder, she presents to your eye, through the cleft, a small 
catch of smooth blue horizon, at an infinite distance in the 
plain country, inviting you, as it were, from the riot and 



48 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

tumult roaring around, to pass through the breach and par- 
ticipate of the calm below." 

After the conclusion of peace with England, in 1783, ])olit- 
ical discussion centered about the Constitution, which in 
1788 took the place of the looser Articles of Confederation 
adoj^ted in 1778. The Constitution as finally ratified was a 
compromise between two parties — the Federalists, Avho 
wanted a strong central government, and the Anti-Federals 
(afterward called Republicans, or Democrats), who wished 
to j^reserve State sovereignty. The debates on the adoption 
of the Constitution, both in the General Convention of the 
States, Avhich met at Philadelj)hia in 1787, and in the sepa- 
rate State conventions called to ratify its action, form a val- 
uable body of comment and illustration upon the instrument 
itself. One of the most notable of the speeches in opj^osi- 
tion was Patrick Henry's address before the Virginia Con- 
vention. " That this is a consolidated government," he said, 
" is demonstrably clear ; and the danger of such a govern- 
ment is, to my mind, very striking." The leader of the 
Federal party was Alexander Hamilton, the ablest construct- 
ive intellect among the statesmen of our Revolutionary era, 
of Avhom Talleyrand said that he "had never known his 
equal;" whom Guizot classed with "the men who have best 
known the vital principles and fundamental conditions of a 
government worthy of its name and missiou." Hamilton's 
speech On the Expediency of Adopting the Federal Con- 
stitution^ delivered in the Convention of New York, June 
24, 1788, was a masterly statement of the necessity and ad- 
vantages of the Union. But the most complete exposition 
of the constitutional philosophy of the Federal joarty was 
the series of eighty-five papers entitled the Federalist, 
printed during the years 1787-88, and mostly in the In- 
dependent Journal of New York, over the signature " Pub- 
lius." These were the work of Hamilton, of John Jay, 
afterward chief- justice, and of James Madison, afterward 



The Revolutioxary Period, 49 

President of the United States. The Federalist pa[)ers, 
though written in ta somewhat 2:)ondcrous diction, are among 
the great landmarks of American history, and were in tliem- 
sclves a political education to the generation that read them. 
Hamilton was a brilliant and versatile figure, a persuasive 
orator, a forcible writer, and as secretary of the treasury 
under Washington the foremost of American financiers. He 
was killed in a duel by Aaron Burr, at Weehawken, in 1804. 

The Federalists were victorious, and under the provisions 
of the new Constitution George Washington was inau- 
gurated first President of the United States, on March 4, 
1789. Washington's writings have been collected by Jared 
Sparks. They consist of journals, letters, messages, ad- 
dresses, and public documents, for the most part plain and 
business-like in manner, and Avithout any literary preten- 
sions. The most elaborate and the best known of them is 
his FareiDell Address, issued on his retirement from the 
presidency in I'ZOG. In the composition of this he was as- 
sisted by Madison, Hamilton, and Jay. It is wise in sub- 
stance and dignified, though somewhat stilted in expression. 
The correspondence of John Adams, second President of the 
United States, and his Diary, kept from 1755-85, should also 
be mentioned as important sources for a full knowledge of 
this 2)eriod. 

In the long life-and-dcath struggle of Great Britain against 
the French Republic and its successor. Napoleon Bonaparte, 
the Federalist j^arty in this country naturally sympathized 
with England, and the Jeffersonian Democracy with France. 
The Federalists, who distrusted the sweeping abstractions of 
the French Revolution and clung to the conservative notions 
of a checked and balanced freedom, inherited from English 
precedent, were accused of monarchical and aristocratic lean- 
ings. On their side they were not slow to accuse their ad- 
versaries of French atheism and French Jacobinism. By a 
singular reversal of the natural order of things, the strength 
4 



50 Initial Studies in American Lettebs. 

of the Federalist party was in New England, whicli was 
socially democratic, while the strength of the Jeffersonians 
was in the South, whose social structure — owing to the sys- 
tem of slavery — was intensely aristocratic. The War of 1812 
with England was so unpopular in New England, by reason 
of the injury which it threatened to inflict on its commerce, 
that the Hartford Convention of 1814 was more than sus- 
pected of a design to bring about the secession of New En- 
gland from the Union. A good deal of oratory was called 
out by the debates on the commercial treaty with Great 
Britain negotiated by Jay in 1795, by the Alien and Sedition 
Law of 1798, and by other pieces of Federalist legislation, 
previous to the downfall of that party and the election of 
Jefferson to the presidency in 1800. The best of the Feder- 
alist orators during those years was Fisher Ames, of Massa- 
chusetts, and the best of his orations was, perhaps, his speech 
on the British treaty in the House of Representatives, April 
18, 1796. The speech was, in great measure, a protest 
against American chauvinism and the violation of interna- 
tional obligations. " It has been said the world ought to 
rejoice if Britain was sunk in the sea ; if where there are 
now men and wealth and laws and liberty there was no 
more than a sand-bank for sea-monsters to fatten on; space 
for the storms of the ocean to mingle in conflict. . . . What 
is patriotism ? Is it a narrow affection for the spot where a 
man was born ? Are the very clods where we tread entitled 
to this ardent preference because they are greener ? . . . I see 
no exception to the resj^ect that is paid among nations to the 
law of good faith. ... It is observed by barbarians — a whiff 
of tobacco-smoke or a string of beads gives not merely bind- 
ing force but sanctity to treaties. Even in Algiers a truce 
may be bought for money, but, when ratified, even Algiers 
is too wise or too just to disown and annul its obligation." 
Ames was a scholar, and his speeches are more finished 
and thoughtful, more literary^ in a way, than those of his 



Thk Revolutionary Period. 51 

contemporaries. His eulogiums on Washington and Hamilton 
are elaborate tributes, rather excessive, perhaps, in laudation 
and in classical allusions. In all the oratory of the Revolu- 
tionary period there is nothing equal in deep and condensed 
energy of feeling to the single clause in Lincoln's Gettys- 
burg Address, " that we here highly resolve that these dead 
shall not have died in vain." 

A prominent figure during and after the War of the Revo- 
lution was Thomas Paine, or, as he was somewhat disrespect- 
fully called, " Tom Paine," He was a dissenting minister who, 
conceiving himself ill-treated by the British government, 
came to Philadelphia in 1774 and threw himself heart and 
soul into the colonial cause. His pamphlet. Common Sense, 
issued in 1776, began with, the famous words, "These are 
the times that- try men's souls." This was followed by the 
Crisis, a series of political essays advocating independence 
and the establishment of a republic, published in periodical 
form, though at irregular intervals. Paine's rough and vig- 
orous advocacy was of great service to the Amei-ican patriots. 
His writings were popular and his arguments were of a kind 
easily understood by plain people, addressing themselves to 
the common sense, the prejudices and j^assions of iinlettei'ed 
readers. He afterward went to France and took an active 
part in the popular movement there, crossing swords with 
Burke in his Hlghts of Man, 1791-92, written in defense of 
the French Revolution. He was one of the two foreigners 
who sat in the Convention; but falling under suspicion dur- 
ing the days of the Terror, he was committed to the prison of 
the Luxembourg and only released upon the fall of Robes- 
pierre July 27, 1794. While in prison he wrote a portion of 
his best-known work, the Age of Reason. This appeared 
in two parts in 1794 and 1795, the manuscript of the first 
part having been intrusted to Joel Barlow, the American 
poet, who happened to be in Paris when Paine was sent 
to prison. 



52 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

The Affe of Reason damaged Paine's repxitatiou in America, 
where the name of " Tom Paine " became a stench in the 
nostrils of the godly and a synonym for atheism and blas- 
phemy. His book Ayas denounced from a hundred pulpits, 
and copies of it were carefully locked away from the sight 
of "the young," whose religious beliefs it might undermine. 
It was, in effect, a crude and pojDular statement of the de- 
istic argument against Christianity. What the cutting logic 
and persiflage — the sourire hideux — of Voltaire had done 
in France, Paine, with coarser materials, essayed to do for 
the English-speaking populations. Deism was in the air of 
the time; Franklin, Jefferson, Ethan Allen, Joel Barlow, and 
other prominent Americans were openly or unavowedly de- 
istic. Free thought, somehow, went along with democratic 
opinions, and was a j^art of the liberal movement of the age. 
Paine was a man without reverence, imagination, oi" religious 
feeling. He was no scholar, and he was not troubled by 
any perception of the deeper and subtler aspects of the ques- 
tions which he touched. In his examination of the Old and 
New Testaments he insisted that the Bible was an imposi- 
tion and a forgery, full of lies, absurdities, and obscenities. 
Supernatural Christianity, with all its mysteries and mira- 
cles, was a fraud practiced by priests upon the people, and 
churches were instruments of oppression in the hands of 
tyrants. This way of accounting for Christianity would not 
now be accepted by even the most " advanced " thinkers. 
The contest between skepticism and revelation has long since 
shifted to other grounds. Both the philosophy and the 
temper of the Age of Beason belong to the eighteenth cent- 
wvj. But Paine's downright pugnacious method of attack 
was effective with shrewd, half -educated doubters; and in 
America well-thumbed copies of his book passed from hand 
to hand in many a rural tavern or store, where the village 
atheist wrestled in debate with the deacon or the school- 
master. Paine rested his argument against Christianity 



The Revolutionary Period. S3 

upon the familiar grounds of the incredibility of miracles, 
the falsity of prophecy, the cruelty or immorality of Moses 
and David and other Old Testament worthies, the disagree- 
ment of the evangelists in their gospels, etc. The spirit of 
his book and his competence as a critic are illustrated by his 
saying of the 'Mew Testament: "Any person who could tell 
a story of an a^Dparition, or of a man's walking, could have 
made such books, for the story is most wretchedly told. 
The sum total of a parson's learning is a-b, ah, and hie, hcBC, 
hoc, and this is more than sufficient to have enabled them, 
had they lived at the time, to have written all the books of 
the New Testament." 

When we turn from the political and controversial writ- 
ings of the Revolution to such lighter literature as existed, 
we find little that would deserve mention in a more crowded 
period. The few things in this kind that have kept afloat on 
the current of time — rari nantes in gurgite vasto — attract 
attention rather by reason of their fewness than of any 
special excellence that they have. During the eighteenth 
century American literature continued to accommodate itself 
to changes of taste in the old country. The so-called clas- 
sical or Augustan writers of the reign of Queen Anne re- 
placed other models of style; the Spectator set the fashion 
of almost all of our ligliter prose, from Franklin's Busybody 
down to the time of Irving, who perpetuated the Addisonian 
tradition later than any English writer. The influence of 
Locke, of Dr. Johnson, and of the parliamentary orators has 
already been mentioned. In poetry the example of Pope 
was dominant, so that we find, for example, William Living- 
ston, who became governor of New Jersey and a member of 
the Continental Congress, writing in 1747 a poem on Philo- 
sophic Solitude which reproduces the tricks of Pope's antith- 
eses and climaxes with the imagery of the Ii,a2')e of the Lock, 
and the didactic morality of the Imitations from Horace 
and the Moral JEssays : 



64 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

" Let ardent heroes seek renown in arms, 

Pant after fame and rush to war's alarms ; 

To shining palaces let fools resort, 

And dunces cringe to be esteemed at court. 

Mine be the pleasure of a rural life, 

From noise remote and ignorant of strife, 

Far from the painted belle and wliito-gloved beau, 

The lawless masquerade and midnight show ; 

From ladies, lap-dogs, courtiers, garters, stars, 

Fops, fiddlers, tyrants, emperors, and czars." 

The most popular poem of tlie Revolutionary period was 
John Trumbull's 3IcFhigcil, published in part at Philadel- 
phia in 1775, and in complete shape at Hartford in 1782. 
It went through more than thirty editions in America, and 
was several times reprinted in England. McFlngal Avas a 
satire in four cantos, directed against the American loyal- 
ists, and modeled quite closely upon Butler's mock heroic 
poem, Iludibras. As Butler's hero sallies forth to put down 
May games and bear-baitings, so the tory McFingal goes out 
against the libertj^-poles and bonfires of the patriots, but is 
tarred and feathered, and otherwise ill-entreated, and finally 
takes refuge in the camp of General Gage at Boston. The 
poem is Avritten with smartness and vivacity, attains often 
to drollery and sometimes to genuine humor. It remains 
one of the best of American political satires, and unques- 
tionably the most successful of the many imitations of Iludi- 
bras, whose manner it follows so closely that some of its 
lines, which have passed into currency as proverbs, are gen- 
erally attributed to Butler. For examj^le: 

" No man e'er felt the halter draw 
With good opinion of the law." 

Or this: 

" For any man with half an ej'e 
"What stands before him may espy ; 
But optics sharp it needs, I ween, 
To see what is not to be seen." 



The Revolutioxary Period. 55 

Trumbull's wit did not spare the vulnerable points of his 
own countrymen, as in his sharp skit at slaver}'^ in the coup- 
let about the newly adopted flag of the Confederation: 

" Inscribed with inconsistent types 
Of Liberty and tliirteen stripes." 

Ti'umbull was one of a group of Connecticut literati, who 
made such noise in their time as the " Hartford Wits." Tlie 
other members of the group were Lemuel Hopkins, David 
Humphreys, Joel Barlow^ Elihu Smith, Theodore Dwight, 
and Richard Alsop. Trumbull, Humphreys, and Barlow 
had formed a friendship and a kind of literary partnership 
at Yale, where they were contemporaries of each other and 
of Timothy Dwight. During the war they served in the 
army'in various capacities, and at its close they found them- 
selves again together for a few years at Hartford, where 
they formed a club that met weekly for social and literary 
purposes. Their presence lent a sort of eclat to the little 
provincial capital, and their writings made it for a time an 
intellectual center quite as important as Boston or Phila- 
delphia or New York. The Hartford Wits w^ere stanch 
Federalists, and used their pens freely in support of the ad- 
ministrations of Washington and Adams, and in ridicule of 
J,efferson and the Democrats. In 1786-87 Trumbull, Hop- 
kins, Barlow, and Humphreys published in the Neio Haven 
Gazette a series of satirical papers entitled the Anarchiad, 
suggested by the English HolUad, and purporting to be ex- 
tracts from an ancient epic on "the Restoration of Chaos and 
Substantial Night." The papers were an effort to correct, 
by ridicule, the anarchic condition of things wdiich preceded 
the adoption of the Federal Constitution in 1789. It was a 
time of great confusion and discontent, Avhen, in parts of 
the country. Democratic mobs were protesting against the 
vote of five years' pay by the Continental Congress to the 
officers of the American army. The Anarcliiad was followed 



56 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

by the Echo and the Political Green House, written mostly 
byAlsopand Theodore Dwight, and similar in character and 
tendency to tlie earlier series. Time has greatly blunted the 
edge of these satires, but they were influential in their day, 
and are an important jjart of the literature of the old Feder- 
alist party. 

Humphreys became afterward distinguished in the diplo- 
matic service, and was, successively, embassador to Portu- 
gal and to Spain, whence he introduced into America the 
breed of merino sheep. He had been on Washington's staff 
during the war, and was several times an inmate of his house 
at Mount Vernon, where he produced, in 1785, the best- 
known of his Avritings, Mount Vernon, an ode of a rather 
mild description, which once had admirers. Joel Barlow 
cuts a larger figure in contemporary letters. After leaving 
Hartford, in 1788, he went to France, where he resided for 
seventeen years, made a fortune in speculations, and became 
imbued with French principles, writing a song in praise of 
the guillotine, which gave great scandal to his old friends 
at home. In 1805 he returned to America and built a fine 
residence near Washington, which he called Kalorama. Bar- 
low's literary fame, in his own generation, rested upon his 
prodigious epic, the Colunibiad. The first form of this was 
the Vision of Colitmhus, published at Hartford in 1787. 
This he afterward recast and enlarged into the Columhiad, 
issued in Philadelphia in 1807, and dedicated to Robert Ful- 
ton, the inventor of the steam-boat. This was by far the 
most sumptuous piece of book-making that had then been 
published in America, and was embellished with plates exe- 
cuted by the best London engravers. 

The Columhiad was a grandiose performance, and has 
been the theme of much ridicule by later writers. Haw- 
thorne suggested its being dramatized, and put on to the 
accompaniment of artillery and thunder and lightning; and 
E. P. Whipple declared that " no ci'itic in the last fifty years 



The Revolutionary Period. 57 

had read more than a hundred lines of it." In its ambitious- 
ness and its length it was s3nnptoraatic of the spirit of the 
age which was patriotically determined to create, by tour de 
force, a national literature of a size commensurate with the 
scale of American nature and the destinies of the republic. 
As America was bigger than Argos and Troy we ought to 
have a bigger epic than the Iliad. Accordingly, Barlow 
makes Hesper fetch Columbus from his prison to a " hill of 
vision," where he unrolls before his eye a panorama of the 
history of America, or, as our bards then preferred to call 
it, Columbia. He shows him the conquest of Mexico by 
Cortez; the rise and fall of the kingdom of the Incas in 
Peru ; the settlements of the English colonies in North 
America; the old French and Indian wars; the Revolution, 
ending with a prophecy of the future greatness of the new- 
born nation. The machinery of the 'Vision was borrowed 
from the 11th and 12th books of Paradise Lost. Barlow's 
verse was the ten-syllabled rhyming couplet of Pope, and his 
poetic style was distinguished by the vague, glittering im- 
agery and the false sublimity which marked the epic at- 
tempts of the Queen Anne poets. Though Barlow was but 
a masquerader in true heroic he showed himself a true poet 
in mock heroic. His Hasty Pudding, written in Savoy in 
1793, and dedicated to Mrs. Washington, was thoroughly 
American, in subject at least, and its humor, though over- 
elaborate, is good. One couplet in particular has prevailed 
against oblivion: 

" E'en in thy native regions how I blush 
To hear the Pennsylvanians call thee Mush 1 " 

Another Connecticut poet — one of the seven who were 
fondly named "The Pleiads of Connecticut" — was Timothy 
Dwight, whose Conquest of Canaan, written shortly after 
his graduation from college, but not published till 1785, was, 
like the Columhiad, an experiment toward the domestication 



58 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

of the epic muse in America, It was written like Barlow's 
poem, in rhymed couplets, and the patriotic impulse of the 
time shows oddly in the introduction of our Revolutionary 
War, by way of episode, among tlie Avars of Israel. Green- 
field Hill, 1794, was an idyllic and moralizing poem, de- 
scriptive of a rural j^arish in Connecticut of which the au- 
thor Avas for a time the pastor. It is not quite Avithout 
merit; shoAVS plainly the influence of Goldsmith, Thomson, 
and Beattie, but as a Avhole is tedious and tame. Byron 
was amused that there should have been an American poet 
christened Timothy, and it is to be feared that amusement 
would have been the chief emotion kindled in the breast of 
the Avicked Voltaire had he ever chanced to see the stern 
dedication to himself of the same poet's Triiimph of Infidel- 
ity, 1788. Much more important than D wight's poetry was 
his able TJieology Explained and Defended, 1V94, a restate- 
ment, Avith modifications, of the Calvinism of Jonathan Ed- 
wards, which was accepted by the Congregational churches 
of New England as an authoritative exponent of the ortho- 
doxy of the time. His Travels in N'eio England and JVew 
York, including descriptions of Niagara, the White Mount- 
ains, Lake George, the Catskills, and other passages of nat- 
ural scenery, not so familiar then as now, was published 
posthumously in 1821, was praised by Southey, and is still 
readable. As President of Yale College from 1795 to 1817 
Dwight, by his learning and ability, his sj^mpathy with young 
men, and the force and dignity of his character, exerted a 
great influence in the community. 

The strong political bias of the time drcAV into its vortex 
most of the miscellaneous literature that was produced. A 
number of ballads, serious and comic, whig and tory, deal- 
ing with the battles and other incidents of the long war, en- 
joyed a wide circulation in the newspapers or Avere hawked 
about in printed broadsides. Most of these have no literary 
merit, and are now mere antiquarian curiosities. A favorite 



The Revolutionary Period. 59 

piece on the tory side was the Goio Chase, a cleverish parody 
on Chevy Chase, written by the gallant and unfortunate Ma- 
jor Andre, at the expense of " Mad " Anthony Wayne. The 
national song Yatikee Boodle was evolved during the Revo- 
lution, and, as is the case with John Broxon's Body and many 
other popular melodies, some obscurity hangs about its ori- 
gin. The air was an old one, and the words of the chorus 
seem to have been adapted or corrupted from a Dutch song, 
and applied in derision to the provincials by the soldiers of 
the British army as early as 1755. Like many another nick- 
name, the term Yankee Doodle was taken up by the nick- 
named and proudly made their own. The stanza, 

"Yankee Doodle came to town," etc., 

antedates the war; but the first complete set of words to the 
tune was the Ya»kee''s Return from. Camp, which is appar- 
ently of the year 1775. The most po})ular humorous ballad 
on the whig side was the Battle of the Kegs, founded on a 
laughable incident of the campaign at Philadelphia. This 
was writen by Francis Hopkinson, a Philadelphian, and one 
of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Hopkin- 
son has some title to rank as one of the earliest American 
humorists. Without the keen wit of McFingal, some of his 
Miscellaneous Essays and Occasional Writings, published in 
1792, have more geniality and heartiness than Trumbull's 
satire. His Letter on Whitewashing is a bit of domestic 
humor that foretokens the Banbury JVetos man ; and his Mod- 
ern Beaming, 1784, a, hnvlesquc on college examinations, in 
which a salt-box is described from the point of view of met- 
aphysics, logic, natural philosophy, mathematics, anatomy, sur- 
gery, and chemistry, long kept its place in school-readers and 
other collections. His son, Joseph Hopkinson, wrote the 
song of Bl^ail Columbia, which is saved from insignificance 
only by the music to which it was married, the then popular 
air of " The President's March." The words were written 



60 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

in 1798, on the eve of a threatened war with France, and at 
a time when party spirit ran high. It was sung nightly by 
crowds in the streets, and for a whole season by a favorite 
singer at the theater; for by this time there were theaters in 
Philadelphia, in New York, and even in puritanic Boston. 
Much better than Hail Columbia was the Star- Spangled Ban- 
ner, the words of which were composed by Francis Scott Key, 
a Marylander, during the bombardment by the British of Fort 
McHenry, near Baltimore, in 1812. More pretentious than 
these was the once celebrated ode of Robert Treat Paine, Jr., 
Adams and Liberty, recited at an anniversary of the Massa- 
chusetts Charitable Fire Society. The sale of this is said to 
have netted its author over $750, but it is, notwithstanding, 
a very wooden performance. Paine was a young Harvard 
graduate, who had married an actress playing at the Old 
Federal Street Theater, the first play-house opened in Bos- 
ton, in 1794. His name was originally Thomas, but this 
was changed for him by the Massachusetts Legislature, be- 
cause he did not wish to be confounded with the author of 
the Age of Beas07i. "Dim are those names erstwhile in 
battle loud," and many an old Rrevolutionary worthy who 
fought for liberty with sword and pen is now utterly forgot- 
ten, or remembered only by some phrase which has become a 
current quotation. Here and there a line has, by accident, 
survived to do duty as a motto or inscription, while all 
its context is buried in oblivion. Few have read any 
thing more of Jonathan M. Sewall's, for example, than the 
couplet, 

" No pent-up Utica contracts your powers, 
But the whole boundless continent is yours," 

taken from his Epilogue to Cato, written in 1778. 

Another Revolutionary poet was Philip Freneau — "that 
rascal Freneau," as Washington called him, when annoyed 
by the attacks upon his administration in Freneau's National 



The Revolutionary Period. 61 

Gazette. He was of Huguenot descent, was a class-mate of 
Madison at Princeton College, was taken prisoner by the 
British during the war, and Avhen the war was over engaged 
in journalism, as an ardent supj^orter of Jefferson and the 
Democrats. Freneau's patriotic verses and political lam- 
poons are now unreadable; but he deserves to rank as the 
first real American poet, by virtue of his Wild Honeysuckle, 
Indian Burying- Ground, Indian Student, and a few other 
little pieces, which exhibit a grace and delicacy inherited, 
perhaps, with his French blood. 

Indeed, to speak strictly, all of the " poets " hitherto men- 
tioned were nothing but rhymers; but in Freneau we meet 
Avith something of beauty and artistic feeling; something 
Avhich still keeps his verses fresh. In his treatment of In- 
dian themes, in particular, appear for the first time a sense 
of the picturesque and poetic elements in the character and 
wild life of the red man, and that pensive sentiment which 
the fading away of the tribes toward the sunset has left in 
the wake of their retreating footsteps. In this Freneau antici- 
pates Cooper and Longfellow, though his work is slight com- 
pared with the Leather stocking Tales or HiaioatJia. At the 
time when the Revolutionary War broke out the population 
of the colonies was over three millions; Philadelphia had 
thirty thousand inhabitants, and the frontier had retired to a 
comfortable distance from the sea-board. The Indian had 
already grown legendary to town dwellers, and Freneau 
fetches his Indian Student not from the outskirts of the 
settlement but from the remote backwoods of the State: 

" From Susquehanna's farthest springs, 
Where savage tribes pursue tlieir game 

(His blanket tied with yellow strings), 
A sheplierd of the forest came." 

Campbell "lifted" — in his poem 0^ Conor* s Child— the 
last line of the following stanza from Freneau's Indian 
Burying- Ground: 



62 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

" By midoight moons, o'er moistening dews, 

In vestments for the chase arrayed, 
The hunter still the deer pursues — 

The hunter and the deer, a shade." 

And Walter Scott did Freneau the honor to borrow, in 
Marmion, the final line of one of the stanzas of his poem on 
the battle of Eutaw Sj^rings: 

"They saw their injured country's woe, 

The flaming town, the wasted tield; 
Then rushed to meet the insulting foe; 

They took the spear, but left the shield." 

Scott inquired of an American gentleman who visited him 
the authorship of this poem, which he had by heart, and pro- 
nounced it as fine a thing of the kind as there was in the 
language. 

The American drama and American prose fiction had their 
beginning during the jieriod now under review. A company 
of English players came to this country in 1752 and made 
the tour of many of the principal towns. The first play 
acted here by professionals on a public stage was the Mer- 
chant of Venice, which was given by the English company 
at Williamsburg, Va., in 1752. The first regular theater 
building was at Annapolis, Md., where in the same year this 
troupe performed, among other pieces, Farquhar's Beaux^ 
Stratagem. In 1753 a theater was built in New York, and 
one in 1759 in Philadelphia. The Quakers of Philadelj^hia 
and the Puritans of Boston were strenuously opposed to the 
acting of plays, and in, the latter city the players were sev- 
eral times arrested during the performances, under a Massa- 
chusetts law forbidding dramatic performances. At New- 
port, R. I., on the other hand, which was a health resort for 
planters from the Southern States and the West Indies, and 
the largest slave-market in the North, the actors were hospi- 
tably received. The first play known to have been written 



The REV9LUT10NARY Period. 63 

by an American was the Prince of Parthla, 1765, a closet 
drama, by Thomas Godfrey, of Philadelphia. The lirst play 
by an American writer, acted by professionals in a public 
theater, was Royall Tyler's Contrast, jjerformed in New 
York in 1786. The former of these was very high tragedy, 
and the latter very low comedy; and neither of them is 
otherwise remarkable than as being the first of a long line of 
indift'erent dramas. There is, in fact, no American dramatic 
literature worth speaking of; not a single American play of 
even the second rank, unless we except a few graceful jjarlor 
comedies, like Mr. Howell's Elevator and Sleeping- Car. 
Royall Tyler, the author of TJie Contrast, cut quite a figure in 
his day as a wit and journalist, and eventually became chief- 
justice of Vermont. His comedy, Tlie Georgia *S^>ec, 1797, 
had a great run in Boston, and his Algerine Captive, pub- 
lished in the same year, was one of the. earliest American 
novels. It was a rambling tale of adventure, constructed 
somewhat upon the plan of Smollett's novels and dealing 
with the piracies which led to the war between the United 
States and Algiers in 1815. 

Charles Brockden Brown, the first American novelist of 
any note, was also the first professional man of letters in 
this country who supported himself entirely by his pen. He 
was born in Philadelphia in 1771, lived a part of his life in 
New York and part in his native city, where he started, in 
1 803, the Literary Magazine and American Register. During 
the years 1798-1801 he published in rapid succession six 
romances, Wieland, Ormond, Arthur Mervyn, Edgar Hunt- 
leg, Clara Howard, and Jane Talbot. Brown was an invalid 
and something of a recluse, with a relish for the ghastly in 
incident and the morbid in character. He was in some 
points a prophecy of Poe and Hawthorne, though his art 
was greatly inferior to Poe's, and almost infinitely so to 
Hawthorne's, His books belong more properly to the con- 
temporary school of fiction in England which preceded the 



64 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

" Waverley Novels " — to the class that includes Beckf ord's 
VatheJc, Godwin's Caleb Williams and St. Leon, Mrs. Shel- 
ley's Franhensteiyi, and such " Gothic " romances as Lewis's 
Monh, Walpole's Castle of Otranto, and Mrs. Radcliffe's 
3fysteries of Udolpho. A distinguishing characteristic of 
this whole school is what we may call the clumsy-horrible. 
Brown's romances are not wanting in inventive power, in 
occasional situations that are intensely thrilling, and in 
subtle analysis of character; but they are fatally defective 
in art. The narrative is by turns abrupt and tiresomely 
prolix, proceeding not so much by dialogue as by elaborate 
dissection and discussion of motives and states of mind, in- 
terspersed Math the author's reflections. The wild improb- 
abilities of plot and the unnatural and even monstrous de- 
velopments of character are in startling contrast with the 
old-fashioned preciseness of the language ; the conversations, 
when there are any, being conducted in that insipid dialect 
in which a fine woman was called an "elegant female." 
The following is a sample description of one of BroAvn's 
heroines, and is taken from his novel of Ormond, the lead- 
ing character in which — a combination of unearthly intel- 
lect with fiendish wickedness — is thought to have been sug- 
gested by Aaron Burr : " Helena Cleves was endowed with 
every feminine and fascinating quality. Her features were 
modified by the most transient sentiments and were the seat 
of a softness at all times blushful and bewitching. All 
those graces of sj^mmetry, smoothness, and luster, which as- 
semble in the imagination of the painter when he calls from 
the bosom of her natal deep the Paphian divinity, blended 
their perfections in the shade, complexion, and hair of this 
lady." But, alas ! " Helena's intellectual deficiencies could 
not be concealed. She was proficient in the elements of no 
science. The doctrine of lines and surfaces was as dispro- 
portionate with her intellects as with those of the mock- 
bird. She had not reasoned on the principles of human 



The Revolutionary Period. 65 

action, nor examined the structure of society. . . . She 
could not commune in their native dialect with the sages of 
Rome and Athens. . . . The constitution of nature, the at- 
tributes of its Author, the arrangement of the parts of the 
external universe, and the substance, modes of operation, 
and ultimate destiny of human intelligence were enigmas 
unsolved and insoluble by her." 

Brown frequently raises a superstructure of mystery on a 
basis ludicrously weak. Thus the hero of his first novel, 
Wieland (whose father anticipates " Old Krook," in Dickens's 
Bleak House, by dying of spontaneous combustion), is led 
on by what he mistakes for spiritual voices to kill his wife 
and children; and the voices turn out to be produced by 
the ventriloquism of one Carwin, the villain of the story. 
^'um\di.Y\.jin. Edgar Huntley, the plot turns upon the phenomena 
of sleep-walking. Brown had the good sense to place the 
scene of his I'omances in his own country, and the only pas- 
sages in them which have now a living interest are his 
descriptions of wilderness scenery in Edgar Huntley, and 
his graphic account in Arthur Mervyn of the yellow-fever 
epidemic in Philadelphia in lYOS. Shelley was an admirer 
of Brown, and his experiments in prose fiction, such as 
Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne the Rosicrucian, are of the same 
abnormal and speculative type. 

Another book which falls within this period was the 
Journal, 1774, of John Woolman, a New Jersey Quaker, 
which has received the highest praise from Channing, 
Charles Lamb, and many others, " Get the writings of John 
Woolman by heart," wrote Lamb, " and love the early Quak- 
ers." The charm of this journal resides in its singular 
sweetness and innocence of feeling, the " deep inward still-, 
ness " peculiar to the people called Quakers. Apart from 
his constant use of certain phrases peculiar to the Friends 
Woolman's English is also remarkably graceful and pure, the 
transparent medium of a soul absolutely sincere, and tender 
5 



66 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

and humble in its sincerity. When not working at his trade as 
a tailor Woolman spent his time in visiting and ministering 
to the monthly, quarterly, and yearly meetings of Friends, 
traveling on horseback to their scattered communities in the 
backwoods of Virginia and North Carolina, and northward 
along the coast as far as Boston and Nantucket. He was 
under a "concern" and a "heavy exercise" touching the 
keeping of slaves, and by his writing and speaking did 
much to influence the Quakers against slavery. His love 
went out, indeed, to all the wretched and oppressed ; to 
sailors, and to the Indians in particulai*. One of his most 
perilous journeys was made to the settlements of Moravian 
Indians in the wilderness of western Pennsylvania, at 
Bethlehem, and at Wehaloosing, on the Susquehanna. 
Some of the scruples which Woolman felt, and the quaint 
naivete with which he expresses them, may make the modern 
reader smile, but it is a smile which is very close to a tear. 
Thus, when in England — where he died in 17V2 — he would 
not ride nor send a letter by mail-coach, because the poor 
post-boys were compelled to ride long stages in winter nights, 
and were sometimes frozen to death. " So great is the 
hurry in the spirit of this world that, in aiming to do business 
quickly and to gain wealth, the creation at this day doth 
loudly groan." Again, having reflected that war was caused 
by luxury in dress, etc., the use of dyed garments grew un- 
easy to him, and he got and wore a hat of the natural color 
of the fur. " In attending meetings this singularity was a 
trial to me, . . . and some Friends, who knew not from what 
motives I wore it, grew shy of me. . . . Those who spoke 
with me I generally informed, in a few words, that I be- 
lieved my wearing it was not in my own will." 



1. Representative American Orations. Edited by Alex- 
ander Johnston. New York : G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1884. 

2. 77ie Federalist. New York: Charles Scribner. 1863. 



The Revolutionary Period. 67 

3. Notes on Virginia. By Thomas Jefferson. Boston. 
1829. 

4. Travels in New England and New York. By Timothy 
Dwight. New Haven. 1821. 

5. McFingal: in Trumbull's Poetical Works. Hartford. 
1820. 

6. Joel Barlow's Hasty Pudding. Francis Hopkinson's 
Modern Learning. Philip Freneau's Indian Student, In- 
dian Bury ing - Ground, and White Honeysuckle: in Vol. I 
of Duyckinck's Cyclopedia of Americafi literature. New 
York: Charles Scribner. 1860. 

7. Arthur Jlervyn. By Charles Brockden Brown. Bos- 
ton: S. G. Goodrich. 1827. 

8. T7ie Journal of John Wbolman. With an Introduc- 
tion by John G. Whittier. Boston: James R. Osgood & 
Co. 1871. 

9o American literature. By Charles F. Richardson. 
New York: G. P. Putnani's Sons. 1887. 

10. American literature. By John Nichol. Edinburgh: 
Adam & Charles Black. 1882. 



68 Initial Studies in American Letters. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE ERA OF NATIONAL EXPANSION. 
1815-1837. 

The attemjJt to preserve a strictly chronological order 
must here be abandoned. About all the American literature 
in existence that is of any value as litei'ature is the product 
of the past three quarters of a century, and the men who pro- 
duced it, though older or younger, were still contemporaries. 
Irving's Knickerhocker' s History of N'eio York, 1809, was 
published within the recollection of some yet living, and the 
venerable poet Richard II. Dana — Irving's junior by only 
four years — survived to 1879, when the youngest of the gen- 
eration of writers that now occupy public attention had 
already won their spurs. Bryant, whose Thanatopsis was 
printed in 1816, lived down to 1878. He saw the beginnings 
of our national literature, and he saw almost as much of the 
latest phase of it as we see to-day in this year 1891. Still, 
even within the limits of a single life-time, there have been 
progress and change. And so, while it will happen that the 
consideration of writers, a part of whose work falls between 
the dates at the head of this chapter, may be postponed to 
subsequent chapters, we may in a general way follow the se- 
quence of time. 

The period between the close of the second war with En- 
gland, in 1815, and the great financial crash of 1837, has 
been called, in language attribiited to President Monroe, 
" the era of good feeling." It was a time of peace and 
prosperity, of rapid growth in population and rapid exten- 
sion of territory. The new nation was entering upon its 



Thk Era of National Expansiotst. 69 

vast estates and beginning to realize its manifest destiny. 
The peace with Great Britain, by calling off the Canadian 
Indians and the other tribes in alliance with England, had 
opened up the North-west to settlement. Ohio had been 
admitted as a State in 1802; but at the time of President 
Monroe's tour, in 1817, Cincinnati had only seven thousand 
inhabitants, and half of the State was unsettled. The Ohio 
River flowed for most of its course through an unbroken 
wilderness. Chicago was merely a fort. Hitherto the emi- 
gration to the West had been sporadic; now it took on the 
dimensions of a general and almost a concerted exodus. 
This movement was stimulated in New England by the cold 
summer of 1816 and the late spring of 1817, which produced 
a scarcity of food that amounted in parts of the interior to 
a veritable famine. All through this period sounded the 
ax of the pioneer clearing the forest about his log-cabin, and 
the rumble of the canvas-covered emigrant-wagon over the 
primitive highways which crossed the Alleghanies or followed 
the valley of the Mohawk. S. G. Goodrich, known in letters 
as "Peter Parley," in his Mecollections of a Life-time, 1856, 
describes the part of the movement which he had witnessed 
as a boy in Fairfield County, Connecticut: "I remember 
very well the tide of emigration through Connecticut, on its 
way to the West, during the summer of 1817. Some per- 
sons went in covered wagons — frequently a family consisting 
of father, mother, and nine small children, with one at the 
breast — some on foot, and some crowded together under the 
cover, with kettles, gridirons, featlier-beds, crockery, and the 
family Bible, Watts's Psalms and Hymns, and Webster's 
Spelling-book — the lares and penates of the household. 
Others started in ox-carts, and trudged on at the rate of ten 
miles a day. . . . Many of these persons were in a state of 
poverty, and begged their way as they went. Some died 
before they reached the expected Canaan; many perished 
after their arrival from fatigue and privation; and others 



VO Initial Studies in American Letters. 

from the fever and ague, which was then certain to attack 
the new settlers. It was, I think, in 1818 that I published a 
small tract entitled, ''Tother Side of Ohio — that is, the other 
view, in contrast to the popular notion that it was the para- 
dise of the world. It was written by Dr. Hand — a talented 
young physician of Berlin — who had made a visit to the 
West about these days. It consisted mainly of vivid but 
painful pictures of the accidents and incidents attending this 
wholesale migration. The roads over the Alleghanies, be- 
tween Philadelphia and Pittsburg, were then rude, steep, 
and dangerous, and some of the more precipitous slopes were 
consequently strewn with the carcasses of wagons, carts, 
horses, oxen, which had made shipwreck in their perilous 
descents." 

But in spite of the hardships of the settler's life the spirit 
of that time, as reflected in its writings, was a hopeful and a 
light-hearted one. 

" Westward the course of empire takes its way," 

runs the famous line from Berkeley's poem on America. 
Tlie New Englanders who removed to the Western Reserve 
went there to better themselves ; and their children found 
themselves the owners of broad acres of virgin soil in place 
of the stony hill pastures of Berkshire and Litchfield. There 
was an attraction, too, about the wild, free life of the front- 
iersman, with all its perils and discomforts. The life of 
Daniel Boone, the pioneer of Kentucky — that " dark and 
bloody ground " — is a genuine romance. Hardly less pictur- 
esque was the old river life of the Ohio boatmen, before the 
coming of steam banished their queer craft from the water. 
Between 1810 and 1840 the center of population in the 
United States had moved from the Potomac to the neighbor- 
hood of Clarksburg, in West Virginia, and the population 
itself had increased from seven to seventeen millions. The 
gain was made partly in the East and South, but the general 



The Era of National Expansion. 71 

drift Avas westward. During the years now under review 
the following new States were admitted, in the order named: 
Indiana, Mississippi, Illinois, Alabama, Maine, Missouri, Ar- 
kansas, Michigan. Kentucky and Tennessee had been made 
States in the last years of the eighteenth century, and Lou- 
isiana — acquired by purchase from France — in 1812. 

The settlers, in their westward march, left large tracts of 
wilderness behind them. They took up first the rich bottom- 
lands along the river courses, the Ohio and Miami and Lick- 
ing, and later the valleys of the Mississippi and Missouri and 
the shores of the great lakes. But there still remained back- 
woods in New York and Pennsylvania, though the cities of 
New York and Philadelj^hia had each a population of more 
than one hundred thousand in 1815, When the Erie Canal 
was opened, in 1825, it ran through a primitive forest. N, P. 
Willis, who went by canal to Buffalo and Niagara in 1827, 
describes the houses and stores at Rochester as standing 
among the burnt stumps left by the first settlers. In the 
same year that saw the opening of this great water-way, the 
Indian tribes, numbering now about one hundred and thirty 
thousand souls, were moved across the Mississippi. Their 
power had been broken by General Harrison's victory over 
Tecumseh at the battle of Tippecanoe, in 1811, and they 
were in fact mere remnants and fragments of the race which 
had hung upon the skirts of civilization and disputed the 
advance of the white man for two centuries. It was not 
until some years later than this that railroads began to take 
an important share in opening up new country. 

The restless energy, the love of adventure, the sanguine 
anticipation which characterized American thought at this 
time, the picturesque contrasts to be seen in each mushroom 
town where civilization was encroaching on the raw edge of 
the wilderness — all these found expression, not only in such 
well-known books as Cooper's Pioneers, 1823, and Irving's 
Toxt/r on the Prairies^ 1835, but in the minor literature which 



12 Initial Studies in American Letteks. 

is read to-day, if at all, not for its own sake, but for the 
light that it throws on the history of national development: 
in such books as Paulding's story of Westwa7'd Ho ! and his 
poem. The, Hackwoodsman, 1818; or as Timothy Flint's 
Recollections, 1826, and his Geography and History of the 
Mississippi Valley, 1827. It was not an age of great books, 
but it was an age of large ideas and expanding prospects. 
The new consciousness of empire uttered itself hastily, 
crudely, ran into buncombe, " spread-eagleism," and other 
noisy forms of patriotic exultation; but it was thoroughly 
democratic and American. Though literature — or at least 
the best literature of the time — was not yet emancipated 
from English models, thought and life, at any rate, were no 
longer in bondage — no longer provincial. And it is signifi- 
cant that the party in office during these years was the Demo- 
cratic, the party which had broken most completely with 
conservative traditions. The famous "Monroe doctrine" 
was a pronunciamento of this aggressive democracy, and 
though the Federalists returned to power for a single term, 
under John Quincy Adams (1825-29), Andrew Jackson 
received the largest number of electoral votes, and Adams 
was only chosen by the House of Representatives in the ab- 
sence of a majority vote for any one candidate. At the close 
of his term " Old Hickory," the hero of the people, the most 
characteristically democratic of our presidents, and the first 
backwoodsman who entered the White House, was borne 
into office on a wave of popular enthusiasm. We have now 
arrived at the time when American literature, in the higher 
and stricter sense of the term, really began to have an exist- 
ence. S. G. Goodrich, who settled at Hartford as a book- 
seller and publisher in 1 8 1 8, says, in his Recollections : " About 
this time I began to think of trying to bring out original 
American works. . . . The general impression was that we 
had not, and could not have, a literature. It was the precise 
point at which Sidney Smith had uttered that bitter taunt 



The Era of National Expansion. V3 

in tlie Edlnhurgh Review, ' Who reads an American book ? ' 
... It was positively injurious to the commercial credit of 
a book -seller to undertake American works." Washington 
Irving (1783-1859) was the first American author whose 
books, as books, obtained recognition abroad; whose name 
was thought woi'thy of mention beside the names of English 
contemporary authors, like Byron, Scott, and Coleridge. 
He was also the first American writer whose writings are 
still read for their own sake. We read Mather's 3Iagnalia, 
and Franklin's Axdobiograpky , and Trumbull's McF'mgal — 
if we read them at all — as history, and to learn about the 
times or the men. But we read the Sketch Book, and 
Knickerhocker'' s History of New York, and the Conquest of 
Granada for themselves and for the pleasure that they give 
as pieces of literary art. 

We have arrived, too, at a time when we may apply a more 
cosmopolitan standard to the works of American writers, and 
may disregard many a minor author whose productions would 
have cut some figure had they come to light amid the pov- 
erty of our colonial age. Hundreds of these forgotten names, 
with specimens of their unread writings, are consigned to a 
limbo of immortality in the pages of Duyckinck's Cyclopedia 
and of Griswold's Poets of America and Prose Writers of 
America. We may select here for special mention, and as 
most representative of the thought of their time, the names of 
Irving, Cooper, Webster, and Channing. 

A generation was now coming upon the stage who could 
recall no other government in this country than the govern- 
ment of the United States, and to whom the Revolutionary 
War was but a tradition. Born in the very year of the peace, 
it was a part of Irving's mission, by the sympathetic charm 
of his writings and by the cordial recognition which he won 
in both countries, to allay the soreness which the second war, 
of 1812-15, had left between England and America. He 
was well fitted for the task- of mediator. Conservative by 



74 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

nature, early drawn to the venerable worship of the Episcopal 
Church, retrospective in his tastes, with a prefei'ence for the 
past and its historic associations, which, even in young Amer- 
ica, led him to invest the Hudson and the region about New 
York Avith a legendary interest, he wrote of American themes 
in an English fashion, and interpreted to an American pub- 
lic the mellow attractiveness that he found in the life and 
scenery of Old England. He lived in both countries, and 
loved them both; and it is hard to say whether Irving is 
more of an English or of an American writer. His first visit 
to Europe, in 1804-6, occupied nearly two years. From 
1815 to 1832 he was abroad continuously, and his "domi- 
cile," as the lawyers say, during these seventeen years was 
really in England, though a portion of his time was spent 
upon the Continent, and several successive years in Sj^ain, 
where he engaged upon the Life of Columbus, the Conquest 
of Granada, the Gotrnpanions of Columbus, and the Alham- 
bra, all published between 1828 and 1832. From 1842 to 
1846 he was again in Spain as American minister at 
Madrid. 

Irving was the last and greatest of the Addisonians. His 
boyish letters, signed " Jonathan Oldstyle," contributed in 
1802 to his brother's newspaper, the Morning Chronicle^ 
were, like Franklin's Busybody, close imitations of the Spec- 
tator. To the same family belonged his Salmayundi papers, 
1807, a series of town-satires on New York society, written 
in conjunction with his brother William and with James K. 
Paulding. The little tales, essays, and sketches which com- 
pose the Sketch JBook were written in England, and pub- 
lished in America, iu periodical numbers, in 1819-20. In 
this, which is in some respects his best book, he still main- 
tained that attitude of observation and spectatorship taught 
him by Addison. The volume had a motto taken from Bur- 
ton: "I have no wife nor children, good or bad, to provide 
for — a mere spectator of other men's fortunes," etc. ; and 



The Era of National Expansion. 75 

"The Author's Account of Himself," began in true Addi- 
sonian fashion: "I was always fond of visiting new scenes 
and observing strange characters and manners." 

But though never violently " American," like some later 
Avriters who have consciously sought to throw off the ti'am- 
mels of English tradition,' Irving was in a real way original.^ 
His most distinct addition to our national literature was in 
his creation of what has been called " the Knickerbocker 
legend." He was the first to make use, for literary pur- 
poses, of the old Dutch traditions which clustered about the 
romantic scenery of the Hudson. Colonel T. W. Higginson, 
in his History of the United States, tells how " Mrs. Josiah 
Quincy, sailing up that river in 1786, when Irving was a 
child three years old, records that the captain of the sloop 
had a legend, either supernatural or traditional, for every 
scene, * and not a mountain reared its head unconnected 
with some marvelous story.' " The material thus at hand 
Irving shaped into his KnicJcerhocker's History of New Y^ork, 
into the immortal story of Iii2) Vcm Winkle and the Legend 
of Sleepy Holloxo (both published in the Sketch J^ook), and 
into later additions to the same realm of fiction, such as Dolph 
Jleyliger in Bracebridge Hall, the Money Diggers, Wolfert 
Webber, and Kidd the Pirate, in the Tales of a Travieler, and 
some of the miscellanies from the Knickerbocker Magazine, 
collected into a volume, in 1855, under the title of Wolfert^ s 
Roost. 

The book which made Irving's reputation was his Knick- 
erbocker'' s History of New York, 1809, a burlesque chroni- 
cle, making fun of the old Dutch settlers of New Amster- 
dam, and attributed, by a familiar and now somewhat thread- 
bare device,' to a little old gentleman named Diedrich 
Knickerbocker, whose manuscript had come into the editor's 
hands. The book was gravely dedicated to the New York 

' Compare Carlyle's Herr Diogenes Teufelsdrockh, in Sartor Resarlus, the 
author of the famous " Clothes Philosophy." 



76 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

Historical Society, and it is said to have been quoted, as 
authentic history, by a certain German scholar named Goel- 
ler, in a note on a passage inThucydides. This story, though 
well vouched, is hard of belief; for Knickerbocker, though 
excellent fooling, has nothing of the grave irony of Swift in 
his Modest Proposal or of Defoe in his Short WaywitJt Dis- 
senters. Its mock-heroic intention is as transparent as in 
Fielding's parodies of Homer, which it somewhat resembles, 
particularly in the delightfully absurd description of the 
mustering of the clans under Peter Stuyvesant and the at- 
tack on the Swedish Fort Christina. Knicherhocher'' s History 
of New York was a real addition to the comic literature of 
the world, a work of genuine humor, original and vital. 
Walter Scott said that it reminded him closely of Swift, and 
had touches resembling Sterne. It is not necessary to claim 
for Irving's little masterpiece a place beside Gulliver''s 
Travels and Tristram Shandy. But it was, at least, the first 
Amei'ican book in the lighter departments of literature which 
needed no apology and stood squarely on its own legs. It 
was written, too, at just the right time. Although New 
Amsterdam had become New York as early as 16G4, the im- 
press of its first settlers, with their quaint conservative ways, 
was still upon it when Irving was a boy. The descendants 
of the Dutch families formed a definite element not only in 
Manhattan, but all up along the kills of the Hudson, at Al- 
bany, at Schenectady, in Westchester County, at IIol)oken, 
and Communipaw, localities made familiar to him in many a 
ramble and excursion. He lived to see the little provincial 
town of his birth grow into a great metropolis, in which all 
national characteristics were blended together, and a tide of 
immigration from Europe and New England flowed over the 
old landmarks and obliterated them utterly. 

Although Irving was the first to reveal to his countrymen 
the literary possibilities of their early history it must be 
acknowledged that with modern American life he had little 



The Era of National Expansion. 11 

sympathy. He hated politics, and in the restless democratic 
movement of the time, as we have described it, he found no 
inspiration. This moderate and placid gentleman, with his 
distrust of all kinds of fanaticism, had no liking for the Puri- 
tans or for their descendants, the New England Yankees, if 
we may judge from his sketch of Ichabod Crane in the 
Lef/end of Sleepy Hollow. His genius was reminiscent, and 
his imagination, like Scott's, was the historic imagination. 
In crude America his fancy took refuge in the picturesque 
aspects of the past, in " survivals " like the Knickerbocker 
Dutch and the Acadian peasants, whose isolated communi- 
ties on the lower Mississippi he visited and described. He 
turned naturally to the ripe civilization of the Old World. 
He was our first picturesque tourist, the first " American in 
Europe." He rediscovered England, whose ancient churches, 
quiet landscapes, memory-haunted cities, Christmas celebra- 
tions, and rural festivals had for him an unfailing attraction. 
With pictures of these, for the most part, he filled the pages 
of the Sketch Book and Bracehridge Hall, 1822. Delightful 
as are these English sketches, in which the author conducts 
his reader to Windsor Castle, or Stratford-on-Avon, or the 
Boar's Head Tavern, or sits beside him on the box of the old 
English stage-coach, or shares with him the Yule-tide cheer 
at the ancient English country-house, their interest has some- 
what faded. The pathos of the Broken Heart and the Pride 
of the Village, the mild satire of the Art of Book-Making, 
the rather obvious reflections in Westminster Abbey are not 
exactly to the taste of this generation. They are the litera- 
ture of leisure and retrospection; and already Irving's gentle 
elaboration, the refined and slightly artificial beauty of his 
style, and his persistently genial and sympathetic attitude 
have begun to pall upon readers who demand a more nervous 
and accentuated kind of writing. It is felt that a little 
roughness, a little harshness, even, would give relief to his 
pictures of life. There is, for instance, something a little 



"78 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

irritating in th« old-fashioned courtliness of his manner 
toward women ; and one reads with a certain impatience 
smoothly punctuated passages like the following : " As the 
vine, which has long twined its graceful foliage about the oak, 
and been lifted by it into sunshine, will, when the hardy 
plant is rifted by the thunder-bolt, cling round it with its 
caressing tendrils, and bind up its shattered boughs, so is it 
beautifully ordered by Providence that woman, who is the 
mere dependent -and ornament of man in his happier hours, 
should be his stay and solace when smitten with sudden 
calamity, winding herself into the rugged recesses of his 
nature, tenderly supporting the drooping head and binding 
up the broken heart." 

Irving's gifts were sentiment and humor, with an imagina- 
tion sufficiently fertile and an observation sufficiently acute 
to support those two main qualities, but inadequate to the 
service of strong passion or subtle thinking, though his 
pathos, indeed, sometimes reached intensity. His humor 
was always delicate and kindly; his sentiment never degen- 
erated into sentimentality. His diction was graceful and 
elegant — too elegant, perhaps; and, in his modesty, he attrib- 
uted the success of his books in England to the astonish- 
ment of Englishmen that an American could write good 
English. 

In Spanish history and legend Irving found a still newer 
and richer field for his fancy to work upon. He had not the 
analytic and philosophical mind of a great historian, and the 
merits of his Conquest of Granada and Life of Columbus 
are rather helletristisch than scientific. But he brought to 
these undertakings the same eager love of the romantic past 
Avhich had determined the character of his writings in Amer- 
ica and England, and the result — whether we call it history 
or romance — is at all events charming as literature. His 
Life of Washingt07i — completed in 1859 — was his magnum 
opus, and is accepted as standard authority. Mahomet and 



The Eea of National Expansion. 79 

JTis Successors, 1850, was comparatively a failure. But of 
all Irving's biographies his Life of Oliver Goldsmith, 1849, 
was the most spontaneous and perhaps the best. He did 
not impose it upon himself as a task, but wrote it from a 
native and loving sympathy with his subject, and it is, 
therefore, one of the choicest literary memoirs in the lan- 
guage. 

When Irving returned to America, in 1832, he was the re- 
cipient of almost national honors. He had received the 
medal of the Royal Society of Literature and the degree of 
D.C.K from Oxford University, and had made American 
literature known and respected abroad. In his modest home 
at Sunnyside, on the banks of the river over which he had 
been the first to throw the witchery of poetry and romance, 
he was attended to the last by the admiring affection of his 
countrymen. He had the love and praises of the foremost 
English writers of his own generation and the generation 
which followed — of Scott, Byron, Coleridge, Thackeray, and 
Dickens, some of whom had been among his personal friends. 
He is not the greatest of American authors, but the influence 
of his Avritings is sweet and wholesome, and it is in many 
ways fortunate that the first American man of letters who 
made himself heard in Europe should have been in all par- 
ticulars a gentleman. 

Connected with Irving, at least by name and locality, were 
a number of authors who resided in the city of New York, 
and who are known as the Knickerbocker writers, perhaps 
because they were contributors to the Knickerhocher Maga- 
zine. One of these was James K. Paulding, a connection of 
Irving by marriage, and his partner in the Salmagundi 
papers. Paulding became Secretary of the Navy under 
Van Buren, and lived down to the year 1860. He was a 
voluminous author, but his writings had no power of contin- 
uance, and are already obsolete, with the possible exception 
of his novel, the DutchmavUs Fireside^ 1831, 



80 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

A finer spirit than Paulding was Joseph Rodman Drake, 
a young poet of great promise, who died in 1820, at the age 
of twenty-live. Drake's patriotic lyric, tlie American Flag, 
is certainly the most spirited thing of the kind in our poetic 
literature, and greatly superior to such national anthems as 
Hall Columbia and the Star- Spangled Banner. His Culprit 
Fay, published in 1819, was the best poem that had yet 
appeared in America, if we except Bryant's Thanatopsis, 
which was three years the elder. The Culprit Fay was a 
fairy story, in which, following Irving's lead, Drake under- 
took to throw the glamour of poetry about the Highlands of 
the Hudson. Edgar Poe said that the poem was fanciful 
rather than imaginative; but it is prettily and even brilliantly 
fanciful, and has maintained its popularity to the present 
time. Such verse as the following — which seems to show 
that Drake had been reading Coleridge's Chrlstabel, pub- 
lished three years before — was something new in American 
poetry : 

" The winds are whist and the owl is still, 

The bat in the shelvy rock is hid, 
And naught is heard on the lonely hill 
But the cricket's chirp and the answer shrill 

Of tlie gauze-winged katydid, 
And the plaint of the wailing whip-poor-will, 

Who moans unseen, and ceaseless sings 
Ever a note of wail and woe, 

Till morning spreads her rosy wings, 
And earth and sky in her glances glow." 

Here we have, at last, the whijj-poor-will, an American 
bird, and not the conventional lark or nightingale, although 
the elves of the Old World seem scarcely at home on the 
banks of the Hudson. Drake's memory has been kept fresh 
not only by his own poetry, but by the beautiful elegy writ- 
ten by his friend Fitz-Greene Halleck, the first stanza of 
which is universally known: 



The Era of National Expansion. 81 

"Green be the turf above thee, 

Friend of my better days ; 
None knew thee but to love thee, 

Nor named thee but to praise." 

Halleck was born in Guilford, Connecticut, whither he re- 
tired in 1849, and resided there till his death in 1867. But 
his literary career is identified with New York. He was 
associated with Drake in writing the Croaker Papers, a 
series of humorous and satirical verses contributed in 1814 
to the Evening Post. These were of a merely local and 
temporary interest; but Halleck's fine ode, Marco Pozzaris 
— though declaimed until it has become hackneyed — gives 
him a sure title to remembrance; and his Ahnoick Castle, a 
monody, half serious and half playful on the contrast be- 
tween feudal associations and modern life, has much of that 
pensive lightness which characterizes Praed's best vers de 
societe. 

A friend of Drake and Halleck was James Fenimore 
Cooper (1789-1851), the first American novelist of distinc- 
tion, and, if a popularity which has endured for nearly 
three quarters of a century is any test, still the most success- 
ful of all American novelists. Cooper was far more in- 
tensely American than Irving, and his books reached an even 
wider public. " They are published as soon as he produces 
them," said Morse, the electrician, in 1833, "in thirty-four 
different places in Europe. They have been seen by Ameri- 
can travelers in the languages of Turkey and Persia, in Con- 
stantinople, in Egypt, at Jerusalem, at Ispahan." Cooper 
wrote altogether too much; he published, besides his fictions, 
a JVaval History/ of the United States, a series of naval biog- 
raphies, works of travel, and a great deal of controversial 
matter. He wrote over thirty novels, the greater part of 
which are little better than trash, and tedious trash at that. 
This is especially true of his tendenz novels and his novels of 
society. He was a man of strongly marked individuality, 
6 



82 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

fiery, pugnacious, sensitive to criticism, and abounding in 
jirejudices. He was embittered by the scurrilous attacks 
made upon him by a portion of the American press, and 
spent a great deal of time and energy in conducting libel 
suits against the newspapers. In the same spirit he used 
fiction as a vehicle for attack upon the abuses and follies of 
American life. Nearly all of his novels, written with this 
design, are worthless. Nor was Cooper well equipped by 
nature and temperament for depicting character and pas- 
sion in social life. Even in his best romances his hero- 
ines and his " leading juveniles " — to borrow a term from 
the amateur stage — are insipid and conventional. He was 
no satirist, and his humor was not of a high order. He 
Avas a rapid and uneven writer, and, unlike Irving, he had 
no style. 

Where Cooper was great was in the story, in the invention 
of incidents and plots, in a power of narrative and description 
in tales of wild adventure which keeps the reader in breath- 
less excitement to the end of the book. He originated the 
novel of the sea and the novel of the wilderness. He 
created the Indian of literature; and in this, his peculiar field, 
although he has had countless imitators, he has had no equals. 
Cooper's exjjeriences had prepared him Avell for the kingship 
of this new realm in the world of fiction. His childhood Avas 
passed on the borders of Otsego Lake, Avhen central New 
York was still a wilderness, with boundless forests stretch- 
ing westward, broken only here and tliere by the clearings 
of the pioneers. He Avas taken from college (Yale) when 
still a lad, and sent to sea in a merchant vessel, before the 
mast. Afterward he entered the navy and did duty on the 
high seas and upon Lake Ontario, tlien surrounded by virgin 
forests. He married and resigned his commission in 1811, 
just before the outbreak of the war Avith England, so that he 
missed the opportunity of seeing active service in any of 
those engagements on the ocean and our great lakes which 



The Era of National Expansion, 83 

were so glorious to American arms. But he always retained 
an active interest in naval affairs. 

His first successful novel was The Spy, 1821, a tale of the 
Revolutionary War, the scene of which was laid in West- 
chester County, N. Y., where the author Avas then residing. 
The hero of this story, Harvey Birch, was one of the most 
skillfully drawn figures on his canvas. In 1823 he published 
the Pioneers, a work somewhat overladen with description, 
in wliicli ho drev,' for material upon his boyish recollections 
of frontier life at Cooperstown. This Avas the first of the 
series of five romances known as the Leather stocking Tales. 
The others were the Last of the Jlohicans, 1826 ; the Prairie, 
1827; the Pathfinder, 1840; and the Deerslayer, 1841. The 
hero of this series, Natty Bumpo, or " Leatherstocking," was 
Cooper's one great creation in the sphere of character, his 
most original addition to the literature of the world in the 
way of a new human type. This backwoods philosopher — 
to the conception of whom the historic exploits of Daniel 
Boone perhaps supplied some hints; unschooled, but moved 
by noble impulses and a natural sense of piety and justice; 
passionately attached to the wilderness, and following its 
westering edge even unto the prairies — this man of the 
Avoods was the first real American in fiction. Hardly less 
individual and vital were the various types of Indian charac- 
ter, in Chingachgook, Tineas, Hist, and the Huron warriors. 
Inferior to these, but still vigorously though somewhat 
roughly drawn, were the waifs and strays of civilization, 
whom duty, or the hojje of gain, or the love of adventure, or 
the outlawry of crime had driven to the Avilderness — the sol- 
itary trapj^er, the reckless young frontiei'sman, the ofliicers and 
men of out-post garrisons. Whether Cooper's Indian was the 
real being, or an idealized and rather melodramatic version of 
the truth, has been a subject of dispute. However this be, he 
has taken his place in the domain of art, and it is safe to say 
that his standing there is secure. No boy will ever give him np. 



84 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

Equally good with tlie Leatherstocking novels, and equally 
national, Avere Cooper's tales of the sea, or at least the best 
two of them — the Pilot, 1823, founded upon the daring ex- 
ploits of John Paul Jones, and the Red Mover, 1828. But 
here, though Cooper still holds the sea, he has had to admit 
competitors; and Britannia, who rules the waves in song, has 
put in some claim to a share in the domain of nautical fiction 
in the persons of Mr. "VY. Clark Russell and others. Though 
Cooper's novels do not meet the deeper needs of the heart and 
the imagination, their aj^peal to the universal love of a story 
is perennial. We devour them when we are boys, and if we 
do not often return to them wlien we are men, that is per- 
haps only because we have read them before, and "know the 
ending." They are good yarns for the forecastle and the 
camp-fire; and the scholar in his study, though he may put 
the Deerslayer or the ZiCist of the Mohicans away on the 
top shelf, will take it down now and again, and sit up half 
the night over it. 

Before dismissing the belles-lettres writings of this period, 
mention should be made of a few poems of the fugitive kind 
which seem to have taken a permanent place in popular re- 
gard. John Howard Payne, a native of Long Island, a wan- 
dering actor and playwright, who died American consul at 
Tunis in 1852, wrote about 1820 for Covent Garden Theater 
an opera, entitled Clari, the libretto of which included the 
now famous song of Home, Sweet Home. Its literary pre- 
tensions were of the humblest kind, but it spoke a true word 
which touched the Anglo-Saxon heart in its tenderest spot, 
and, being happily married to a plaintive air, was sold by the 
hundred thousand, and is evidently destined to be sung for- 
ever. A like success -has attended the Old Oaken Bucket, 
composed by Samuel Woodworth, a printer and journalist 
from Massachusetts, whose other poems, of which two col- 
lections were issued in 1818 and 1826, Avere soon forgotten. 
Richard Henry Wilde, an Irishman by birth, a gentleman of 



The Era of Kation^al Expansio^t. 85 

scholarly tastes and accomplishments, who wrote a great 
deal on Italian literature, and sat for several terms in Con- 
gress as Representative of the State of Georgia, was the au- 
thor of the favorite song, 3/y Life is Like the Summer Rose. 
Another Southerner, and a member of a distinguished South- 
ern family, was Edward Coate Pinkney, who served nine 
years in the navy, and died in 1828, at the age of twenty-six, 
having published in 1825 a small volume of lyrical poems 
which had a fire and a grace uncommon at that time in 
American verse. One of these, A Health, beginning, 

" I fill this cup to oue made up of loveliness alone," 

though perhaps somewhat overpraised by Edgar Poe, has 
rare beauty of thought and expression. 

John Quincy A.dams, sixth President of the United States 
(1825-29), was a man of culture and literary tastes. lie 
published his lectures on rhetoric, delivered during his tenure 
of the Boylston Professorship at Harvard in 1806-9; he left 
a voluminous diary, which has been edited since his death 
in 1848 ; and among his experiments in poetry is one of con- 
siderable merit, entitled TIm Wants of Man, an ironical ser- 
mon on Goldsmith's text: 

" Man wants but little here below, 
Nor wants that little long." 

As this poem is a curiously close anticipation of Dr. 
Holmes's Contentment, so the very popular ballad, Old 
Grimes, written about 1818, by Albert Gorton Greene, an 
undergraduate of Brown University in Rhode Island, is in 
some respects an anticipation of Holmes's quaintly pathetic 
Last Leaf 

The political literature and public oratory of the United 
States during this period, although not absolutely of less im- 
portance than that which preceded and followed the Declara- 
tion of Independence and the adoption of the Constitution, 



86 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

demands less relative attention in a history of literature by 
reason of the growth of other departments of thought. The 
age Avas a i^olitical one, but no longer exclusively political. 
The debates of the time centered about the question of 
" State Rights," and the main forum of discussion was the 
old Senate chamber, then made illustrious by the presence of 
Clay, Webster, and Calhoun. The slavery question, which 
had threatened trouble, was put off for a while by the Mis- 
souri Compromise of 1820, only to break out more fiercely in 
the debates on the Wilmot Proviso and the Kansas and 
Nebraska Bill. Meanwhile the Abolition movement had 
been transferred to the press and the platform. Garrison 
started his Liberator in 1830, and the Antislavery Society 
was founded in 1833. The Whig party, which had inherited 
the constitutional principles of the old Federal party, advo- 
cated intei'nal improvements at national expense and a high 
protective tariff. The State Rights party, which was strong- 
est at the South, opposed these views, and in 1832 South 
Carolina claimed the right to " nullify " the tariff imposed 
by the general government. The leader of this party was 
John Caldwell Calhoun, a South Carolinian, who in his speech 
in the United States Senate, on February 13, 1832, on NuUifi-- 
cation and the Force Bill, set forth most authoritatively the 
" Carolina doctrine." Calhoun was a great debater, but hardly 
a great orator. His speeches are the arguments of a lawyer 
and a strict constitutionalist, severely logical, and with a 
sincere conviction in the soundness of his case. Their lan- 
guage is free from bad rhetoric ; the reasoning is cogent, 
but there is an absence of emotion and imagination; they 
contain few quotable things, and no passages of commanding 
eloquence, such as strew the orations of Webster and Burke. 
They are not, in short, literature. Again, the speeches of 
Henry Clay, of Kentucky, the leader of the Whigs, whose 
persuasive oratory is a matter of tradition, disappoint in the 
reading. The fire has gone out of them. 



The Eka op National Expansion. 87 

Not so with Daniel Webster, the greatest of ^Vinericau 
forensic orators, if, indeed, he be not the greatest of all 
orators who have used the English tongue. Webster's 
speeches are of the kind that have power to move after the 
voice of the speaker is still. The thought and the passion 
in them lay hold on feelings of patriotism more lasting than 
the issues of the moment. It is, indeed, true of Webster's 
speeches, as of all speeches, that they are known to posterity 
more by single brilliant passages than as wholes. In oratory 
the occasion is of tlie essence of the thing, and only those 
parts of an address which are permanent and universal in 
their appeal take their place in literature. But of such de- 
tachable passages there are happily many in Webster's ora- 
tions. One great thought underlay all his public life, the 
thought of the Union — of American nationality. What in 
Hamilton had been a principle of political philosophy liad be- 
come in Webster a passionate conviction. The Union was 
his idol, and he was intolerant of any faction which threat- 
ened it from any quarter, whether the Nullifiers of South 
Carolina or the Abolitionists of the North. It is this 
thought which gives grandeur and elevation to all his utter- 
ances, and especially to the wonderful peroration of his Reply 
to Hayne, on Mr. Foot's resolution touching the sale of the 
public lands, delivered in the Senate on January 26, 1830, 
whose closing words, "Liberty and union, now and forever, 
one and inseparable," became the rallying cry of a great 
cause. Similar in sentiment was his famous speech of March 
7, 1850, On the Constitution and the Union, which gave so 
much offense to the extreme Antislavery party, who held 
with Garrison that a Constitution which protected slavery 
was " a league with death and a covenant with hell." It is 
not claiming too much for Webster to assert that the sen- 
tences of these and other speeches, memorized and declaimed 
by thousands of school-boys throughout the North, did as 
much as any single influence to train up a generation in hatred 



88 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

of secession, and to send into the fields of the civil war armies 
of men animated with the stern resolution to fight till the 
last drop of blood was shed, rather than allow the Union to 
be dissolved. 

The figure of this great senator is one of the most impos- 
ing in American annals. The masculine force of his person- 
ality impressed itself upon men of a very difierent stamp — 
upon the unworldly Emerson, and upon the captious Carlyle, 
whose respect was not willingly accorded to any contempo- 
rary, much less to a representative of American democracy. 
Webster's looks and manner were characteristic. His form 
was massive, his skull and jaw solid, the under-lip projecting, 
and the mouth firmly and grimly shut; his complexion was 
swarthy, and his black, deep-set eyes, under shaggy brows, 
glowed with a smoldering fire. He was rather silent in so- 
ciety; his delivery in debate was grave and weighty, rather 
than fervid. His oratory was massive, and sometimes even 
ponderous. It may be questioned whether an American or- 
ator of to-day, with intellectual abilities equal to Webster's 
— if such a one there were — would permit himself the use 
of sonorous and elaborate pictures like the famous period 
which follows: "On this question of principle, while actual 
suffering was yet afar offj they raised their flag against a 
power to which, for purposes of foreign conquest and sub- 
jugation, Rome, in the height of her glory, is not to be 
compared — a power which has dotted over the surface of 
the whole globe with her j^ossessions and military posts, 
whose morning drum-beat, following the sun and keeping 
company with the hours, circles the earth with one continu- 
ous and unbroken strain of the martial airs of England," 
The secret of this kind of oratory has been lost. The 
present generation distrusts rhetorical ornament and likes 
something swifter, simpler, and more familiar in its speak- 
ers. But every thing, in declamation of this sort, de- 
pends on the way in which it is done. Webster did it 



The Era of National Expansion. 89 

supremely well; a smaller man "would merely have made 
buncombe of it. 

Among the legal orators of the time the foremost was 
Rufus Choate, an eloquent pleader, and, like Webster, a 
United States senator from Massachusetts. Some of his 
speeches, though excessively rhetorical, have literary quality, 
and are nearly as effective in print as "Webster's own. An- 
other Massachusetts orator, Edward Everett, who in his 
time was successively professor in Harvard College, Unita- 
rian minister in Boston, editor of the North American Review, 
member of both houses of Congress, minister to England, 
governor of his State, and President of Harvard, was a 
speaker of great finish and elegance. His addresses were 
mainly of the memorial and anniversary kind, and were 
rather lectures and $. B. K. prolusions than speeches. Ev- 
erett was an instance of careful culture bestowed on a soil of 
no very great natural richness. It is doubtful whether his 
classical orations on Washington, the Republic, Bunker 
Hill Monument, and kindred themes, have enough of the 
breath of life in them to preserve them much longer in rec- 
ollection. 

New England, during these years, did not take that 
leading part in the purely literary development of the 
country which it afterward assumed. It had no names to 
match against those of Irving and Cooper. Drake and 
Halleck — slender as was their performance in point of quan- 
tity — were better poets than the Boston bards, Charles 
Sprague, whose Shakespeare Ode, delivered at the Boston 
theater in 1823, was locally famous; and Richard Henry 
Dana, whose longish narrative poem, the Buccaneer, 1827, 
once had admirers. But Boston has at no time been with- 
out a serious intellectual life of its own, nor without a 
circle of highly educated men of literary pursuits, even in 
default of great geniuses. The ISForth Americaii Revieio, 
established in 1815, though it has been wittily described as 



90 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

" ponderously revolving through space " for a few years 
after its foundation, did not exist in an absolute vacuum, 
but was scholai-ly, if somewhat heavy. Webster, to be sure, 
was a Massachusetts man — as wei-e Everett and Choate — 
but his triumphs were won in the wider field of national 
politics. There was, however, a movement at this time, in 
the intellectual life of Boston and eastern Massachusetts, 
which, though not immediately contributory to the finer 
kinds of literature, prepared the way, by its clarifying and 
stimulating influences, for the eminent writers of the next 
generation. This was the Unitarian revolt against Puritan 
orthodoxy, in which William Ellery C/hanning was the prin- 
cipal leader. In a community so intensely theological as 
New England, it was natural that any new movement in 
thought should find its point of departure in the churches. 
Accordingly, the progressive and democratic spirit of the 
age, which in other parts of the country took other shapes, 
assumed in Massachusetts the form of " liberal Christianity." 
Arminianism, Socinianism, and other phases of anti-Trin- 
itarian doctrine, had been latent in some of the Congrega- 
tional churches of Massachusetts for a number of years. 
But about 1812 the heresy broke out openly, and within a few 
years from that date most of the oldest and wealthiest church 
societies of Boston and its vicinity had gone over to Unita- 
rianism, and Harvard College had been captured too. In 
the controversy that ensued, and which was carried on in 
numerous books, pamphlets, sermons, and periodicals, there 
were eminent disputants on both sides. So far as this con- 
trovei'sy was concerned with the theological doctiine of the 
Trinity it has no place in a history of literature. But the 
issue went far beyond that. Channing asserted the dignity 
of human nature against the Calvinistic doctrine of innate 
depravity, and affirmed the rights of human reason and 
man's capacity to judge of God. " We must start in relig- 
ion from our own souls," he said. And in his Moral Argn- 



The Era of National Expansion. 91 

ment against Calmnistm, 1820, he wrote: "Nothing is gained 
to piety by degrading human nature, for in the competency 
of this nature to know and judge of God all piety has its 
foundation." In opposition to Edwards's doctrine of neces- 
sity he emphasized the fi'eedom of the will. He maintained 
that the Calvinistic dogmas of original sin, fore-ordination, 
election by grace, and eternal punishment were inconsistent 
with the divine perfection, and made God a monster. In 
Channing's view the great sanction of religious truth is the 
moral sanction, is its agreement with the laws of conscience. 
He was a passionate vindicator of the liberty of the individ- 
ual, not only as against political oppression, but against the 
tyranny of public opinion over thought and conscience : " We 
were made for free action. This alone is life, and enters 
into all that is good and great." This jealous love of free- 
dom inspired all that he did and wrote. It led him to join 
the Antislavery party. It expressed itself in his elaborate 
arraignment of Napoleon in the Unitarian organ, the Christian 
Examiner, for 1827-28; in his Remarks on Associations, 
and his paper On the Character and Writings of John 
Milton, 1826. This was his most considerable contribution 
to literary criticism. It took for a text Milton's recently 
discovered Treatise on Christian Doctrine — the tendency of 
which was anti-Trinitarian — but it began with a general 
defense of poetry against " those who are accustomed to 
speak of poetry as light reading." This would now seem a 
somewhat superfluous introduction to an article in any Amer- 
ican review. But it shows the nature of the 7nilieu through 
which the liberal movement in Boston had to make its way. 
To re-assert the dignity and usefulness of the beautiful arts 
was, perhaps, the chief service which the Massachusetts 
Unitarians rendered to humanism. The traditional prejudice 
of the Puritans against the ornamental side of life had to be 
softened before polite literature could find a congenial at- 
mosphere in New England. In Channing's JRemarks on 



92 Initial Studies in American Letters, 

National Literature, reviewing a work published in 1823, 
he asks the question, " Do we possess what may be called 
a national literature ? " and answers it, by implication at 
least, in the negative. That we do now possess a national 
literature is in great part due to the influence of Channing 
and his associates, although his own writings, being in the 
main controversial, and, thei-efore, of temporary interest, may 
not themselves take rank among the permanent treasures of 
that literature. 



1. Washington Irving. Knickerbocker'' s History of New 
York. The Sketch Book. Bracehridge Hall. Tales of a 
Traveler. The Alhamhra. Life of Oliver Goldsmith. 

2. James Fenimore Cooper. The Spy. TJie Pilot. The 
Red Rover. The Leather -stocking Tales. 

3. Daniel Webster. Great Speeches and Orations. Bos- 
ton: Little, Brown & Co. 1879. 

4. William Ellery Channing. ITie Character and Writ- 
ings of John Milton. The Life and Character of Napoleon 
Bonaparte. Slavery. [Vols. I and II of the Works of 
William LJ. Channing. Boston: James Munroe & Co. 1841.] 

5. Joseph Rodman Drake. The Culprit Fay. The Amer- 
ican Flag. S^Selected Poems. New York. 1835.] 

6. Fitz-Greene Halleck. Marco Bozzaris. Alnwick Cas- 
tle. On the Death of Drake. \Poems. New York. 1827.] 



The Conoobd Writeks. 93 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE CONCORD WRITERS. 

iss'z-isei. 

There has been but one movement in the history of the 
American mind Avhich has given to literature a group of writ- 
ers having colierenee enough to merit the name of a school. 
This was the great humanitarian movement, or series of 
movements, in New England, which, beginning in the Uni- 
tarianism of Channing, ran through its later phase in tran- 
scendentalism, and spent its last strength in the antislavery 
agitation and the enthusiasms of the civil war. The second 
stage of this intellectual and social revolt was transcendental- 
ism, of which Emerson wrote, in 1842: " The history of genius 
and of religion in these times will be the history of this tend- 
ency." It culminated about 1840-41 in the establishment 
of the Dial and the Brook Farm Community, although Emer- 
son had given the signal a few years before in his little 
volume entitled Nature, 1836, his Phi Beta Kappa address at 
Harvard on the American Scholar, 1837, and his address in 
1838 before the Divinity School at Cambridge. Ral[)h Waldo 
Emerson (1803-82) was the prophet of the sect, and Con- 
cord was its Mecca ; but the influence of the new ideas was 
not confined lo the little group of professed transcendental- 
ists; it extended to all the young writers within x'each, wId 
struck their roots deeper into the soil that it had loosened and 
freshened. We owe to it, in great measure, not merely 
Emerson, Alcott, Margaret Fuller, and Thoreau, but Haw- 
thorne, Lowell, Whittier, and Holmes. 

In its strictest sense transcendentalism was a restatement 



94 Initial Studies in American Letters, 

of the idealistic philosophy, and an application of its beliefs 
to religion, nature, and life. But in a looser sense, and as 
including the more outward manifestations which drew i)op- 
ular attentioii_ most strongly, it was the name given to that 
spirit of dissent and protest, of universal inquiry and exper- 
iment, which marked the third and fourth decades of this cent- 
ury in America, and especially in New England. The move- 
ment was contemporary with political revolutions in Europe 
and with the preaching of many novel gospels in religion, in 
sociology, in science, education, medicine, and hygiene. New 
sects were formed, like the Swedenborgians, Universalists, 
Spiritualists, Millerites, Second Adventists, Shakers, Mormons, 
and Come-outers, some of whom believed in trances, miracles, 
and direct revelations from the divine Spirit ; others in the 
quick coming of Christ, as deduced from the opening of the 
seals and the number of the beast in the Apocalypse ; and 
still others in the reorganization of society and of the family 
on a different basis. New systems of education were tried, 
suggested by the writings of the Swiss reformer, Pestalozzi, 
and others. The pseudo-sciences of mesmerism and of phre- 
nology, as taught by Gall and Spurzheim, had numerous fol- 
lowers. In medicine, homeopathy, hydropathy, and what 
Dr. Holmes calls " kindred delusions," made many disciples. 
Numbers of persons, influenced by the doctrines of Graham 
and other vegetarians, abjured the use of animal food, as in- 
jurious not only to health but to a iiner spirituality. Not a 
few refused to vote or pay taxes. The writings of Fourier 
and Saint-Simon Avere translated, and societies were estab- 
lished where co-operation and a community of goods should 
take the place of selfish competition. 

About the year 1840 there were some thirty of these 
" phalansteries " in America, many of which had their organs 
in the shape of weekly or monthly journals, Avhicli advocated 
the principle of Association. The best known of these was 
probably the Harbinger, the mouth-pieoe of the famous 



The Concord Writers. 95 

Brook Farm Community, which was founded at West Rox- 
bury, Mass., in 1841, and lasted till 1847. The head man of 
Brook Farm was George Ripley, a Unitarian clergyman, who 
had resigned his pulpit in Boston to go into the movement, 
and who after its failure became and remained for many 
years literary editor of the New York Tribune. Among his 
associates were Charles A. Dana — now the editor of the 8un 
— Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others not 
unknown to fame. The Harbinger, which ran from 1845 to 
1849 — two years after the break-up of the community — had 
among its contributors many who were not Brook Farmers, 
but who sympathized more or less with the experiment. Of 
the number were Horace Greeley, Dr. F. H. Hedge — who 
did so much to introduce American readers to German liter- 
ature — J. S. Dwiglit, the musical critic, C. P. Cranch, the 
poet, and younger men, like G. W, Curtis and T. W. Hig- 
ginson. A reader of to-day, looking into an odd volume of 
the Harbinger, will find in it some stimulating writing, to- 
gether with a great deal o*f unintelligible talk about " Har- 
monic Unity," "Love Germination," and other m.atters now 
fallen silent. The most important literary result of this 
experiment at " plain living and high thinking," with its 
queer mixture of culture and agriculture, was Hawthorne's 
Blithedale Romance, which has for its background an ideal- 
ized picture of the community life ; whose heroine, Zenobiaif 
has touches of Margaret Fuller ; and whose hero, with his 
hobby of prison reform, was a type of the one-idea'd philan- 
thropists that abounded in such an environment. Haw- 
thorne's attitude was always in part one of reserve and crit- 
icism, an attitude which is apparent in the reminiscences of 
Brook Farm in his American Note Books, wherein he speaks 
with a certain resentment of "Miss Fuller's ti'anscendental 
heifer," which hooked the other cows, and was evidently to 
Hawthorne's mind not unsymbolic in this respect of Miss 
Fuller herself. 



96 Initial Studies i:n^ American Letters, 

It was the day of seers and " Oi-phic " uttei'ances ; the air 
was full of the enthusiasm of humanity and thick with philan- 
thropic projects and plans for the regeneration of the uni- 
verse. The figure of the wild-eyed, long-haired reformer — 
the man with a panacea — the " crank " of our later terminol- 
ogy — became a familiar one. He abounded at non-resistance 
conventions and meetings of universal peace societies and of 
woman's rights associations. The movement had its grotesque 
aspects, which Lowell has described in his essay on Thoreau. 
" Bran had its apostles and the pre-sartorial simplicity of 
Adam its martyrs, tailored impromptu from the tar-pot. . . . 
Not a few impecunious zealots abjured the use of money 
(unless earned by other people), professing to live on the 
internal revenues of the spirit. . . . Communities were es- 
tablished where every thing was to be common but common 
sense." 

This ferment has long since subsided, and much of what 
was then seething has gone off in vapor or other volatile 
products. But some very solid matters have also been pre- 
cipitated, some crystals of poetry translucent, symmetrical, 
enduring. The immediate practical outcome was disappoint- 
ing, and the external history of the agitation is a record of 
failed experiments, spurious sciences, Utopian philosophies, 
and sects founded only to dwindle away or to be re-absorbed 
into some form of orthodoxy. In the eyes of the conserva- 
tive, or the worldly-minded, or of the plain people who could 
not understand the enigmatic utterances of the reformers, 
the dangerous or ludicrous sides of transcendentalism were 
naturally uppermost. Nevertheless the movement was but a 
new avatar of the old Puritan spirit ; its moral earnestness, 
its spirituality, its tenderness for the individual conscience. 
Puritanism, too, in its day had run into grotesque extremes. 
Emerson bore about the same relation to the absurder out- 
croppings of transcendentalism that Milton bore to tlie New 
Lights, Ranters, Fifth Monarchy Men, etc., of his time. 



The Cojjcori) Writers. 97 

There is in him that mingling of idealism with an abiding 
sanity, and even a Yankee shrewdness, which characterizes 
the race. The practical, inventive, calculating, money-getting 
side of the Yankee has been made sufficiently obvious. But 
the deep heart of New England is full of dreams, mysticism, 

romance: 

" And iu the day of sacrifice, 

When heroes piled the pyre, 
The dismal Massachusetts ice 

Burned more than others' fire." 

^ The one element which the odd and eccentric develop- 
ments of this movement shared in common with the real 
philosophy of ti'anscendentalism was the rejection of author- 
ity and the appeal to the private consciousness as the sole 
standard of truth and right. This principle certainly lay in 
the ethical systems of Kant and Fichte, the great tran- 
scendentalists of Germany. It had been strongly asserted by 
Channing. Nay, it was the starting-point of Puritanism it- 
self, which had drawn away from the ceremonial religion of 
the English Church, and by its Congregational system had 
made each church society independent in doctrine and wor- 
ship. And although Puritan orthodoxy in New England had 
grown rigid and dogmatic it had never used the weapons of 
obscurantism. By encouraging education to the utmost, it 
had shown its willingness to submit its beliefs to the fullest 
discussion and had put into the hands of dissent the means 
with which to attack them. 

In its theological aspect transcendentalism was a departure 
from conservative Unitarianism, as that had been from Cal- 
vinism, From Edwards to Channing, from Channing to 
Emerson and Theodore Parker, there was a natural and log- 
ical unfolding; not logical in the sense that Channing ac- 
cepted Edwards's premises and pushed them out to their 
conclusions, or that Parker accej)ted all of Channing's 
premises, but in the sense that the rigid pushing out of 
7 



98 Initial Studies in Amekioan Letters, 

Edwardis's premises into their conclusions by liiniself and bis 
followers had brought about a moral redtictlo ad ahsurdwa 
and a state of opinion against which Channing rebelled ; and 
that Channing, as it seemed to Parker, stopped short in the 
carrying out of his own principles. Thus the " Channing 
Unitarians," while denying that Christ was God, had held 
tliat he was of divine nature, Avas the Son of God, and had 
existed before he came into the world. While rejecting the 
doctrine of the " vicarious sacrifice " they maintained that 
Christ was a mediator and intercessor, and that his super- 
natural nature was testified by miracles. For Parker and 
Emerson it was easy to take the step to the assertion that 
Christ was a good and great man, divine only in the sense 
that God possessed him more fully than any other man 
known in history; that it was his preaching and example 
that brought salvation to men, and not any special mediation 
or intercession, and that his own words and acts, and not 
miracles, are the only and the sufficient witness to his mis- 
sion. In the view of the transcendentalists Christ was as 
human as Buddha, Socrates, or Confucius, and the Bible was 
but one among the "Ethnical Scriptures" or sacred writings 
of the peoples, passages from which were published in the 
transcendental organ, the Dial. As against these new view* 
Channing Unitarianism occupied already a conservative po- 
sition. The Unitarians as a body had never been very nu- 
merous outside of eastern Massachusetts. They liad a few 
churches in New York and in the larger cities and towns 
elsewhere, but the sect, as such, was a local one. Orthodoxy 
made a sturdy fight against the heresy, under leaders like 
Leonard Woods and Moses Stuart, of Andover, and Lyman 
Beecher, of Connecticut. In the neighboring State of Con- 
necticut, for example, there was until latel}^, for a period of 
several years, no distinctly Unitarian congregation worship- 
ing in a church edifice of its own. On the other hand, the 
Unitarians claimed, with justice, that their opinions had, to a 



The Conciokd Writers, 99 

great extent, modified the theology of the orthodox churches. 
The writings of Horace Bushnell, of Hartford, one of the 
most eminent Congregational divines, ajDproach Unitarianism 
in their interpretation of the doctrine of the Atonement; 
and the " progressive orthodoxy " of Andover is certainly 
not the Calvinism of Thomas Hooker or of Jonathan Ed- 
wards. But it seemed to the transcendentalists that con- 
servative Unitarianism was too negative and " cultured," and 
Margaret Fuller complained of the coMness of the Boston 
pulpits; while, contrariwise, the central tliought of tran- 
scendentalism, that the soul has an immediate connection 
with God, was pronounced by Dr. Channing a " crude spec- 
ulation." This was the thought of Emerson's address in 
1838 before the Cambridge Divinity School, and it was at 
once made the object of attack by conservative Unitarians 
like Henry Ware and Andrews Norton. The latter, in an 
address before the same audience, on the Latest Form of 
InfideUt}/, said: "Nothing is left that can be called Chris- 
tianity if its miraculous character be denied, . . , There can 
be no intuition, no direct perception, of the truth of Chris- 
tianity." And in a pamphlet sujjporting the same side of 
the question he added: " It is not an intelligible error, but a 
mere absurdity, to maintain that we are conscious, or have 
an intuitive knowledge, of the being of God, of our own 
immortality, ... or of any other fact of religion." Ripley 
and Parker replied in Emerson's defense; but Emerson him- 
self would never be drawn into controversy. He said that 
he could not argue. He announced truths; his method was 
that of the seer, not of the disputant. In 1832 Emerson, 
who wa^s a Unitarian clergyman, and descended from eight 
generations of clergymen, had resigned the pastorate of the 
Second Church of Boston because he could not conscien- 
tiously administer the sacrament of the communion — which 
he regarded as a mere act of commemoration — in the sense 
in which it was understood by his parishioners. Thenceforth, 



100 Initial Studiks in American Letters, 

though he sometimes occupied Unitarian pulpits, and was, 
indeed, all his life a kind of " lay preacher," he never as- 
sumed the pastorate of a church. The representative of 
transcendentalism in the pulpit was Theodore Parker, an 
eloquent preacher, an eager debater, and a prolific writer on 
many subjects, whose collected works fill fourteen volumes. 
Parker was a man of strongly human traits, passionate, in- 
dependent, intensely religious, but intensely radical, who 
made for himself a large personal following. The more ad- 
vanced wing of the Unitarians were called, after him, " Par- 
kerites." Many of the Unitarian churches refused to " fel- 
lowship " Avith him; and the large congregation, or audience, 
which assembled in Music Hall to hear his sermons was 
stigmatized as a " boisterous assembly " which came to hear 
Parker preach irreligion. 

It has been said that, on its philosophical side, New En- 
gland transcendentalism was a restatement of idealism. The 
impulse came from Germany, from the philosophical writings 
of»Kant, Fichte, Jacobi, and Schelling, and from the works 
of Coleridge and Carlyle, who had domesticated German 
thought in England. In Channing's Reinarks on a Na- 
tional Literature, quoted in our last chai)ter, the essayist 
urged that our scholars should study the authors of France 
and Germany as one means of emancipating American let- 
ters from a slavish dependence on British literature. And 
in fact German literature began, not long after, to be eagerly 
studied in New England. Emerson published an American 
edition of Carlyle's 3Useellanie8, including his essays on 
German writers that had appeared in England between 1822 
and 1830. In 1838 Ripley began to publish Specimens of 
Foreign Standard Literature, which extended to fourteen 
volumes. In his work of translating and suppljdng intro- 
ductions to the matter selected, he was helj^ed by Ripley, 
Margaret Fuller, John S. Dwight, and others who had more 
or less connection with the transcendental movement. 



The Concord Writers. 101 

The definition of the new faith given by Emerson in his 
lecture on the Transcendentalist, 1842, is as follows: " What 
is popularly called transcendentalism among lis is idealism. 
. . . The idealism of the present day acquired the name of 
transcendental from the use of that term by Immanuel Kant, 
who replied to the skeptical philosophy of Locke, which in- 
sisted that there was nothing in the intellect which was not 
previously in the experience of the senses, by showing that 
there was a very important class of ideas, or imperative 
forms, which did not come by experience, but through which 
experience was acquired ; that these were intuitions of the 
mind itself, and he denominated them transcendental forms." 
Idealism denies the independent existence of matter. Tran- 
scendentalism claims for the innate ideas of God and the soul 
a higher assurance of reality than for the knowledge of the 
outside world derived through the senses. Emerson shares 
the " noble doubt " of idealism. He calls the universe a 
shade, a dream, " this great apparition." " It is a sufficient 
account of that appearance we call the world," he wrote in 
N'ature, " that God will teach a human mind, and so makes 
it the receiver of a certain number of congruent sensations 
which we call sun and moon, man and woman, house and 
ti-ade. In my utter impotence to test the authenticity of the 
report of my senses, to know whether the impressions on me 
correspond with outlying objects, what difference does it 
make whether Orion is up there in heaven or some god 
paints the image in the firmament of the soul ? " On the 
other hand, our evidence of the existence of God and of our 
own souls, and our knowledge of right and wrong, are im- 
mediate, and are independent of the senses. We are in di- 
rect communication with the " Over-soul," the infinite Spirit. 
" The soul in man is the background of our being — an im- 
mensity not possessed, that cannot be possessed." " From 
within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things, 
and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is 



102 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

all." Revelation is " an influx of tlie Divine mind into our 
mind. It is an ebb of the individual rivulet before the flow- 
ing surges of the sea of life." In moods of exaltation, and 
especially in the presence of nature, this contact of the in- 
dividual soul with the absolute is felt. " All mean egotism 
vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I 
see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through 
me ; I am part and particle of God." The existence and 
attributes of God are not deducible from history or from 
natural theology, but are thus directly given us in conscious- 
ness. In his essay on the Transcendental ist Emerson says: 
" His experience inclines him to behold the procession of 
facts you call the world as flowing perpetually outward from 
an invisible, unsounded center in himself; center alike of 
him and of them, and necessitating him to regard all things 
as having a subjective or relative existence — relative to that 
aforesaid Unknown Center of him. There is no bar or wall 
in the soul where man, the effect, ceases, and God, the cause, 
begins. We lie open on one side to the deeps of spiritual 
nature, to the attributes of God." 

Emerson's point of view, though familiar to students of 
philosophy, is strange to the popular understanding, and 
hence has arisen the complaint of his obscurity. Moreover, 
he apprehended and expressed these ideas as a poet, in fig- 
urative and emotional language, and not as a metaphysician, 
in a formulated statement. His own position in relation to 
systematic philosophers is described in what he says of Plato, 
in his series of sketches entitled Mepresentative Men, 1850: 
" He has not a system. The dearest disciples and defenders 
are at fault. He attempted a theory of the universe, and 
his theory is not complete or self-evident. One man thinks 
he means this, and another that; he has said one thing in one 
place, and the reverse of it in another place." It happens, 
therefore, that, to many students of more formal philosophies, 
Emerson's meaning seems elusive, and he apj^ears to write 



The C^oxcord Writers. 103 

from temporary moods and to contradict himself. Had he 
attempted a reasoned exposition of the transcendental phi- 
losophy, instead of writing essays and poems, he might have 
added one more to the number of system-mongers; but he 
Avould not have taken that significant place which he occu- 
pies in the general literature of. the time, nor exerted that 
wide influence upon younger writers which has been one of 
the stimulating forces in American thought. It was because 
Emerson was a poet that he is our Emerson. And yet it 
would be impossible to disentangle his peculiar ])hilosophical 
ideas from the body of his writings and to leave the latter 
to stand upon their merits as literature merely. He is the 
poet of certain high al)stractions, and his religion is central 
to all his woi'k — excepting, perhaps, his English Traits, 1856, 
an acute study of national characteristics ; and a few of his 
essays and verses, which are independent of any particular 
philosophical stand-point. 

When Emerson resigned his parish in 1832 he made a 
short trip to Europe, where he visited Carlyle at Craigen- 
jiuttock, and Landor at Florence. On his return he retired 
to his birthplace, the village of Concord, Massachusetts, and 
settled down among his books and his fields, becoming a sort 
of " glorified farmer," but issuing frequently from his retire- 
ment to instruct and delight audiences of thoughtful people 
at Boston and at other points all through the countr}''. 
Emerson was the perfection of a lyceum lecturer. His man- 
ner was quiet but forcible, his voice of charming quality, 
and his enunciation clean-cut and refined. The sentence was 
his unit in composition. His lectures seemed to begin any- 
where and to end anywhere and to resemble strings of ex- 
quisitely polished sayings rather than continuous discourses. 
His printed essays, with unimportant exceptions, were first 
written and delivered as lectures. In 1836 he published his 
first book, Natxire, which remains the most systematic state- 
ment of his philosophy. It opened a fresh spring-head in 



104 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

American thonglit, and the words of its introduction an- 
nounced that its author had broken with the past. " Why- 
should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe ? 
Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insiglit 
and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us and 
not the history of theirs?" 

It took eleven years to sell live hundred copies of this little 
book. But the year following its publication the remarkable 
Phi Beta Kappa address at Cambridge, on the Afnerican 
Scholar; electrified the little public of the university. This 
is described by Lowell as " an event without any former 
parallel in our literary annals, a scene to be always treasured 
in the memory for its picturesqueness and its inspiration. 
What crowded and breathless aisles, what windows cluster- 
ing with eager heads, what grim silence of foregone dis- 
sent!" To Concord come many kindred spirits, drawn by 
Emerson's magnetic attraction. Thither came, from Con- 
necticut, Amos Bronson Alcott, born a few years before 
Emerson, whom he outlived; a quaint and benignant figure, 
a visionary and a mystic even among the transcendentalists 
themselves, and one who lived in unworldly simplicity the 
life of the soul. Alcott had taught school at Cheshire, Conn., 
and afterward at Boston on an original plan — compelling his 
scholars, for example, to flog him, when they did wrong, in- 
stead of taking a flogging themselves. The experiment was 
successful until his Conversatiotis on the Gospels, in Boston, 
and his insistence upon admitting colored children to his 
benches, offended conservative opinion and broke up his 
school. Alcott renounced the eating of animal food in 1835. 
He believed in the union of thouglit and manual labor, and 
supported himself for some years by the work of his hands, 
gardening, cutting wood, etc. He traveled into the West 
and elsewhere, holding convei'sations on philosophy, educa- 
tion, and religion. He set up a little community at the vil- 
lage of Harvard, Massachusetts, which was rather less success- 



The Concord Writers. 105 

ful than Brook Farm, and he contributed Orphic Sayings to 
the Dial, which were liarder for the exoteric to understand 
than even Emerson's Brahnia or the Over-soul. 

Thither came, also, Sarah Margaret Fuller, the most intel- 
lectual woman of her time in America, an eager student of 
Greek and German literature and an ardent seeker after the 
True, the Good, and the Beautiful. She threw herself into 
many causes — such as temperance and the higher education 
of women. Her brilliant conversation classes in Boston at- 
tracted many "minds" of her own sex. Subsequently, as 
literary editor of the N'eto York Tribune, she furnished a 
wider public Avith reviews and book notices of great ability. 
She took part in the Brook Farm experiment, and she edited 
the I>ial for a time, contributing to it the papers afterward 
expanded into her most considerable book, Woman in the 
Nineteenth Century. In 1846 she went abroad, and at Rome 
took part in the revolutionary movement of Mazzini, having 
charge of one of the hospitals during the siege of the city by 
the French. In 1847 she married an impecunious Italian 
nobleman, the Marquis Ossoli. In 1850 the ship on which 
she was returning to America, with her husband and child, 
was wrecked on Fire Island beach and all three were lost. 
Margaret Fuller's collected writings are somewhat disap- 
pointing, being mainly of temporary interest. She lives less 
through her books than through the memoirs of her friends, 
Emerson, James Freeman Clarke, T, W. Higginson, and oth- 
ers who knew her as a personal influence. Her strenuous 
and rather overbearing individuality made an impression not 
altogether agreeable upon many of her contemporaries. 
Lowell introduced a caricature of her as " Miranda " into his 
Fable for Critics, and Hawthorne's caustic sketch of her, 
preserved in the biography written by his son, has given 
great offense to her admirers, " Such a determination to eat 
this huge universe! " was Carlyle's characteristic comment on 
her appetite for knowledge and aspirations after perfection. 



100 Initial Studies in American Letters, 

To Concord also came Natlianiel Hawthorne, who took up 
his residence there first at the " Old Manse," and afterward 
at " The Wayside." Though naturally an idealist, he said 
that he came too late to Concord to fall decidedly under 
Emerson's influence. Of that he Avould have stood in little 
danger even had he come earlier. He appreciated the deep 
and subtle quality of Emerson's imagination, but his own 
shy genius always jealously guarded its independence and 
resented the too close approaches of an alien mind. Among 
the native disciples of Emerson at Concord the most note- 
Avorthy were Plenry Thoreau, and his friend and biographer, 
William Ellery Channing, Jr., a nephew of the great Chan- 
ning. Channing was a contributor to the Dial, and he pul)- 
lished a volume of poems which elicited a fiercely contemptu 
ous review from Edgar Poe. Though disfigured by aflfecta- 
tion and obscurity, many of • Channing's verses were dis- 
tinguished by true poetic feeling, and the last line of his 
little piece, A Poefs Hope, 

'If my bark sink 'tis to another sea," 

has taken a permanent place in the literature of transcendent- 
alism. 

The private organ of the transcendentalists was the Dial, 
a quarterly magazine, published from 1840 to 1844, and 
edited by Emerson and Margaret Fuller. Among its con- 
tributors, besides those already mentioned, were Ripley, 
Thoreau, Parker, James Freeman Clarke, Charles A. Dana, 
John S. Dwight, C. P. Cranch, Charles Emerson, and Will- 
iam H. Channing, another nephew of Dr. Channing. It con- 
tained, along with a good deal of rubbish, some of the best 
poetry and prose that has been published in America. The 
most lasting part of its contents were the contributions of 
Emerson and Thoreau. But even as a whole it was a unique 
way-mark in the history of our literature. 

From time to time Emerson collected and pul)lished his 



The Concord Writers. 107 

lectures under various titles. A first series of Essays came 
out in 1841, and a second in 1844 ; the Conduct of Life in 
1860, Society and Solitude in 1870, Letters and Social Aim t^ 
in 1876, and tlie Fortune of the Hepuhlic in 1878. In 1847 
he issued a volume of Poems, and 1865 Miiyday a)ul Other 
Poems. These writings, as a whole, were variations on a 
single theme, expansions and illustrations of the philosopliy 
set forth in Nature, and his early addresses, The}^ were 
strikingly original, rich in thought, filled with wisdom, with 
lofty morality and spiritual religion. Emerson, said Lowell, 
first " cut the cable that bound us to English thought and 
gave us a chance at the dangers and glories of blue water." 
Nevertheless, as it used to be the fashion to find an English 
analogue for every American writer, so that Cooper was 
called the American Scott, and Mrs. Sigourney was described 
as the Hemans of America, a well-worn critical tradition has 
coupled Emerson with Carlyle. That his mind received a 
nudge from Carlyle's early essays and from Sartor Pesartus 
is beyond a doubt. They were life-long friends and corre- 
spondents, and Emerson's Pepresentative Men is, in some 
sort, a counterpart of Carlyle's Hero Worship. But in tem- 
per and style the two Avriters were widely different. Car- 
lyle's pessimism and dissatisfaction with the general drift of 
things gained upon him more and more, while Emerson was 
a consistent optimist to the end. The last of his writings 
published during his life-time, the Fortune of the Pej)uldir, 
contrasts strangely in its hopefulness with the desperation 
of Carlyle's later utterances. Even in presence of the doubt 
as to man's personal immortality he takes refuge in a higli 
and stoical faith. "I think all sound minds rest on a certain 
preliminary conviction, namely, that if it be best that con- 
scious personal life shall continue it will continue, and if not 
best, then it Avill not; and we, if we saw the whole, should 
of course see that it was better so." It is this conviction that 
gives to Emerson's writings their serenity and their tonic 



108 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

quality at the same time that it narrows the range of his 
dealings with life. As the idealist declines to cross-examine 
those facts which he regards as merely phenomenal, and 
looks upon this outward face of things as upon a mask not 
worthy to dismay the fixed soul, so the optimist turns away 
his eyes from the evil which he disposes of as merely nega- 
tive, as the shadow of the good. Hawthorne's interest in 
the problem of sin finds little place in Emerson's philosophy. 
Passion comes not nigh him, and Fanst disturbs him with 
its disagreeableness. Pessimism is to him " the only skep- 
ticism." 

The greatest literature is that which is most broadly hu- 
man, or, in other words, that which will square best with all 
philosophies. But Emerson's genius was interpretative rather 
than constructive. The poet dwells in the cheerful world of 
phenomena. He is most the poet who realizes most intensely 
the good and the bad of human life. But Idealism makes 
experience shadowy and subordinates action to contempla- 
tion. To it the cities of men, with their " frivolous popula- 
tions," 

" are but sailing foam-bells 
Along thought's causing stream." 

Shakespeare does not forget that the world will one day 
vanish " like the baseless fabric of a vision," and that we 
ourselves are "such stuff as dreams are made on;" but this 
is not the mood in which he dwells. Again: while it is for 
the philosopher to reduce variety to unity, it is the poet's 
task to detect the manifold under uniformity. In the great 
creative poets, in Shakespeare and Dante and Goethe, how 
infinite the swarm of persons, the multitude of forms ! But 
Avith Emerson the type is important, the common element. 
" In youth we are mad for persons. But the larger experi- 
ence of man discovers the identical nature appearing through 
them all." " The same — the same! " he exclaims in his essay 
on Plato. "Friend and foe are of one stuff; the plowman. 



The Concord Writers. 109 

the plow, and the furrow are of one stuff." And this is the 
thought in Brahma : 

" They reckon ill who leave me out ; 

"When rae they fly I am the wings : 
I am the doubter and the doubt, 

And I the hyinu the Brahmin sings." 

It is not easy to fancy a writer who holds this altitude toward 
"persons" descending to tlie composition of a novel or a 
play. Emerson showed, indeed, a fine power of character- 
analysis in his English Traits and Representative Men and 
in his memoirs of Thoreau and Margaret Fuller. There is 
even a sort of dramatic humor in his portrait of Socrates. 
But upon the whole he stands midway between constructive 
artists, whose instinct it is to tell a story or sing a song, and 
philosophers, like Schelling, who give poetic expression to a 
system of thought. He belongs to the class of minds of 
which Sir Thomas Browne is the best English example. He 
set a high value upon Browne, to whose style his own, though 
far more sententious, bears a resemblance. Browne's saying, 
for example, " All things are artificial, for nature is the art 
of God," sounds like Emerson, whose workmanship, for the 
rest, in his prose essays was exceedingly fine and close. He 
was not afraid to be homely and racy in expressing thought 
of the highest spirituality. " Hitch your wagon to a star " 
is a good instance of his favorite manner. 

Emerson's verse often seems careless in technique. Most 
of his pieces are scrappy and have the air of runic rimes, 
or little oracular " voicings " — ns they say at Concord 
— in rhythmic shape, of single thoughts on " Worship," 
" Character," " Heroism," " Art," " Politics," " Culture," etc. 
The content is the important thing, and the form is too fre- 
quently awkwai'd or bald. Sometimes, indeed, in the clear- 
obscure of Emerson's poetry the deep wisdom of the thought 
finds its most natural expression in the imaginative simplicity 



110 Initial Studies ix American Letters. 

of the lan<^UMge. But though this artlessness iu him bt'cauie 
too frequently iu his imitators, like Thoreau and EUery 
Channing, an obtruded siuiplieity, among his own poems are 
many that leave nothing to be desired in point of wording 
and of verse. His Hymn Sung at the Co)npletion of the 
Concord Monunient, in 1836, is the perfect model of an 
occasional poem. Its lines were on every one's lips at the 
time of the centennial celebrations in 1876, and "the shot 
heard round the world " has hardly echoed farther than the 
song which chronicled it. Equally current is the stanza 
from Voluntaries: 

"So nigh is grandeur to our dust, 

So near is God to man, 
When Duty whispers low, ' Thou must,' 

The youth repHes. ' I can.' " 

So, too, the famous lines from the Problem: 

" The hand that rounded Peter's dome, 
And groined the aisles of Christian Rome, 
Wrought iu a sad sincerit}'. 
Himself from God he could not free ; 
He builded better than he knew ; 
The conscious stone to beauty grew." 

The most noteworthy of Emerson's pupils was Henry 
David Thoreau, "the poet-naturalist." After his graduation 
from Harvard College, in 1837, Thoreau engaged in school- 
teaching and in the manufacture of lead-pencils, but soon 
gave up all regular business and devoted himself to walking, 
reading, and the study of nature. He was at one time pri- 
vate tutor in a family on Staten Island, and he suj^ported 
himself for a season by doing odd jobs in land-surveying for 
the farmers about Concord. In 1845 he built, with his own 
hands, a small cabin on the banks of Walden Pond, near 
Concord, and lived there in seclusion for two years. His ex- 
penses during these years were nine cents a day, and he gave 



The Concord Writers. Ill 

an account of his experinieut in his most characteristic book, 
Walden, published in 1854. His Week on the Concord and 
Merrimac Hlvers appeared in 1849. From time to time he 
went farther atield, and his journeys were reported in Cajye 
Cod^ the Maine Woods^ Excursions, and A Yankee in Can- 
ada, all of which, as well as a volume of Letters and Early 
Spring in Massachusetts, have beeti given to the public since 
his death, which happened in 1862. No one has lived so 
close to nature, and written of it so intimately, as Thoreau. 
His life was a lesson in economy and a sermon on Emerson's 
text, " Lessen your denominator." He wished to reduce exist- 
ence to the simplest terms — to 

"live all alone 
Close to the bone, 
And where life is sweet 
Constantly eat." 

He had a passion for the wild, and seems like an Anglo- 
Saxon reversion to the type of the Red Indian. The most 
distinctive note in Thoreau is his inhumanity. Emerson spoke 
of him as a " perfect piece of stoicism." '' Man," said Tho- 
reau, " is only the point on Avhich I stand." He strove to 
realize the objective life of nature — nature in its aloofness 
from man; to identify himself, with the moose and the mount- 
ain. He listened, with his ear close to the ground, for the 
voice of the earth. "What are the trees saying?" he ex- 
claimed. Following upon the trail of the lumberman, he 
asked the primeval wilderness for its secret, and 

"saw beneath dim aisles, in odorous beds. 
The sliglit linntea hang its twin-born heads." 

He tried to interpret the thought of Ktaadn and to fathom 
the meaning of the billows on the back of Cape Cod, in their 
indifference to the shipwrecked bodies that they rolled 
ashore. "After sitting in my chamber many days, reading 



112 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

the poets, I have been out early on a foggy morning and 
heard the cry of an owl in a neighboring wood as from a 
nature behind the common, unexplored by science or by lit- 
erature. None of the feathered race has yet realized my 
youthful conceptions of the woodland depths. I had seen 
the red election-birds brought from their recesses on my 
comrade's string, and fancied that their plumage would as- 
sume stranger and more dazzling colors, like the tints of 
evening, in proportioD as I advanced farther into the dark- 
ness and solitude of the forest. Still less have I seen such 
strong and wild tints on any poet's string." 

It was on the mystical side that Thoreau apprehended 
transcendentalism. Mysticism has been defined as the soul's 
recognition of its identity with nature. This thought lies 
plainly in Schelling's philosophy, and he illustrated it by his 
famous figure of the magnet. Mind and nature are one; 
they are the positive and negative poles of the magnet. In 
man, the Absolute — that is, God — becomes conscious of him- 
self; makes of himself, as nature, an object to himself as 
mind. " The souls of men," said Schelling, " are but the in- 
numerable individual eyes with which our infinite World- 
Spirit beholds himself." This thought is also clearly present 
in Emerson's view of nature, and has caused him to be ac- 
cused of pantheism. But if by pantheism is meant the doc- 
trine that the underlying principle of the universe is matter 
or force, none of the transcendentalists was a pantheist. In 
their view nature was divine. Their poetry is always 
haunted by the sense of a spiritual reality which abides be- 
yond the phenomena. Thus in Emerson's Two Rivers : 

" Thy summer voice, Musketaquit,' 

Repeats the music of the rain, 
But sweeter rivers pulsing flit 

Through thee as tliou through Concord plain. 

' The Indian name of Concord River. 



The Concord Writers. 113 

" Thou in thy narrow banks art pent : 

The stream I love unbounded goes ; 
Through flood and sea and firmament, 

Through light, through life, it forward flows. 

" I see the inundation sweet, 

I hear the spending of the stream, 
Through years, through men, through nature fleet, 

Through passion, thought, through power and dream." 

This mood occurs frequently in Thoreau. The hard 
world of matter becomes suddenly all fluent and spiritual, 
and he sees himself in it — sees God. " This earth," he cries, 
" which is spread out like a map around me, is but the lining 
of my inmost soul exposed." " In me is the sucker that I 
see; " and, of Walden Pond, 

"I am its stony shore, 

And the breeze that passes o'er." 

" Suddenly old Time winked at me — ah, you know me, 
you rogue — and news had come that it was well. That an- 
cient universe is in such capital health, I think, undoubtedly, 
it will never die. ... I see, smell, taste, hear, feel that ever- 
lasting something to which we are allied, at once our maker, 
our abode, our destiny, our very selves." It was something 
ulterior that Thoreau sought in nature. " The other world," 
he wrote, "is all my art: my pencils will draw no other: my 
jack-knife will cut nothing else." Thoreau did not scorn, 
however, like Emerson, to "examine too microscopically the 
universal tablet." He was a close observer and accurate re- 
porter of the ways of birds and plants and the minuter 
aspects of nature. He has had many followers, who have 
produced much pleasant literature on out-door life. But in 
none of them is there that unique combination of the jjoet, 
the naturalist, and the mystic which gives his page its wild 
original flavor. He had the woodcraft of a hunter and the 
eye of a botanist, but his imagination did not stop short with 
8 



114 Initial Studies ik American Letters. 

the fact. The sound of a tree falling in the Maine woods ' 
was to him " as though a door had shut somewhere in the 
damp and shaggy wilderness." He saw small things in cos- 
mic relations. His trip down the tame Concord has for the 
reader the excitement of a voyage of exploration into far 
and unknown regions. The river just above Sherman's 
Bridge, in time of flood " when the wind blows freshly on a 
raw March day, heaving up the surface into dark and sober 
billows," was like Lake Huron, " and you may run aground 
on Cranberry Island," and " get as good a freezing there as 
anywhere on the North-west coast." He said that most of 
the phenomena described in Kane's voyages could be observed 
in Concord. 

The literature of transcendentalism was like the light of 
the stai'S in a winter night, keen and cold and high. It had 
the pale cast of thought, and was almost too sj^iritual and 
remote to " hit the sense of mortal sight." But it was at 
least indigenous. If not an American literature — not national 
and not inclusive of all sides of American life — it was, at all 
events, a genuine New England literature and true to the 
apiYit of its section. The tough Puritan stock had at last 
put forth a blossom which compared with the warm, robust 
growths of English soil even as the delicate wind flower of 
the northern spring compares with the cowslips and daisies 
of old England. 

In 1842 Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64), the greatest 
American romancer, came to Concord. He had recently left 
Brook Farm, had just been married, and with his bride he 
settled down in the " Old Manse " for three paradisaical 
years. A picture of this protracted honeymoon and this 
sequestered life, as tranquil as the slow stream on whose 
banks it was passed, is given in the introductory chapter to 
his Mosses from an Old Manse, 1846, and in tlie more per- 
sonal and confidential records of his American Note Books, 
posthumously published. Hawthorne was thirty-eight when 



The Conuori) Writers. 115 

he took his place among the Concord literati. His child- 
hood and youth had been spent partly at his birthplace, the 
old and already somewhat decayed sea-port town of Salem, 
and partly at his grandfather's farm on Sebago Lake, iu 
Maine, then on the edge of the primitive forest. Maine did 
not become a State, indeed, until 1820, the year before Haw- 
thorne entered Bowdoin College, whence he was graduated 
in 1825, in the same class with Henry W. Longfellow and 
one year behind Franklin Pierce, afterward President of the 
United States. After leaving college Hawthorne buried 
himself for years in the seclusion of his home at Salem. His 
mother, who was early widowed, had withdrawn entirely 
from the world. For months at a time Hawthorne kept his 
room, seeing no other society than that of his mother and 
sisters, reading all sorts of books and writing wild tales, most 
of which he destroyed as soon as he had written them. At 
twilight he would emerge from the house for a solitary ram- 
ble through the streets of the town or along the sea-side. 
Old Salem had much that was picturesque in its associations. 
It had been the scene of the witch trials in the seventeenth 
century, and it abounded in ancient mansions, the homes of 
retired whalers and India merchants. Hawthorne's father 
had been a ship captain, and many of his ancestors had fol- 
lowed the sea. One of his forefathers, moreover, had been 
a certain Judge Hawthorne, who in 1691 had sentenced sev- 
eral of the witches to death. The thought of tliis affected 
Hawthorne's imagination with a pleasing horror, and he util- 
ized it afterward in his House of the Seven Gables. Many 
of the old Salem houses, too, had their family histories, 
with now and then the hint of some obscure crime or dark 
misfortune which haunted posterity with its curse till all the 
stock died out or fell into poverty and evil Avays, as in the 
Pyncheon family of Hawthorne's romance. In the preface 
to the Marble Faun Hawthorne wrote: "No author without 
a trial can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance 



116 Initial Studies in American Lettees. 

about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no 
mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor any thing but 
a commonjilace prosperity in broad and simple daylight." And 
yet it may be doubted whether any environment could have 
been found more fitted to his peculiar genius than this of his 
native town, or any preparation better calculated to ripen 
the faculty that was in him than these long, lonely years of 
waiting and brooding thought. From time to time he con- 
tributed a story or a sketch to some periodical, such as S, G. 
Goodrich's annual, the Token, or the Knickerbocker Maga- 
zine. Some of these attracted the attention of the judicious; 
but they were anonymous and signed by various noms de 
plume, and their author was at this time — to use his own 
words — " the obscurest man of letters in America," In 1828 
he had issued anonymously and at his own expense a short ro- 
mance, entitled Fanshaioe. It had little success, and copies 
of the fii'st edition are now exceedingly rare. In 1837 he 
published a collection of his magazine pieces under the title, 
Tioice-Told Tales. The book was generously praised in the 
North American Review by his former classmate, Long- 
fellow; and Edgar Poe showed his keen critical perception 
by predicting that the writer would easily put himself at the 
head of imaginative literature in America if he would dis- 
card allegory, drop short stories, and compose a genuine 
romance. Poe compared Hawthorne's work with that of 
the German romancer, Tieck, and it is interesting to find 
confirmation of this dictum in passages of the American 
Note Books, in which Hawthorne speaks of laboring over 
Tieck with a German dictionary. The Twice- Told Tales are 
the work of a recluse, who makes guesses at life from a 
knowledge of his own heart, acquired by a habit of intro- 
spection, but who has had little contact Avith men. Many of 
them were shadowy, and others were morbid and unwhole- 
some. But their gloom was of an interior kind, never the 
physically horrible of Poe. It arose from weird psycho- 



The Concord Writers. 117 

logical situations like that of Ethan Brand in his search for 
the unpardonable sin. Hawthorne was true to the inherited 
instinct of Puritanism; he took the conscience for his theme, 
and in these early tales he was already absorbed in the prob- 
lem of evil, the subtle ways in which sin works out its retri- 
bution, and the species of fate or necessity that the wrong- 
doer makes for himself in the inevitable sequences of his 
crime. iHawthorne was strongly drawn toward symbols and 
types,\and never quite followed Poe's advice to abandon 
allegory. The Scarlet Letter and his other romances are 
not, indeed, strictly allegories, since the characters are men 
and women and not mere personifications of abstract quali- 
ties. Still, they all have a certain allegorical tinge. In the 
Marhle Faun, for example, Hilda, Kenyon, Miriam, and 
Donatello have been ingeniously explained as personifications 
respectively of the conscience, the reason, the imagination, 
and the senses. Without going so far as this, it is possible 
to see in these and in Hawthorne's other creations something 
typical and representative. He uses his characters like alge- 
braic symbols to work out certain problems with; they are 
rather more and yet rather less than flesh and blood individ- 
uals. The stories in Twice- Told Tales and in the second col- 
lection, Mosses from an Old Manse, 1846, are more openly 
allegoi'ical than his later work. Thus the Minister'' s Black 
Veil is a sort of anticipation of Arthur Dimmesdale in the 
Scarlet Better. From 1846 to 1849 Hawthorne held the 
position of surveyor of the Custom House of Salem. In the 
preface to the Scarlet Letter he sketched some of the gov- 
ernment officials with whom this office had brought him into 
contact in a way that gave some offense to the friends of 
the victims and a great deal of amusement to the public. 
Hawthorne's humor was quiet and fine, like Irving's, but less 
genial and with a more satiric edge to it. The book last 
named was written at Salem and published in 1850, just be- 
fore its author's removal to Lenox, now a sort of inland 



118 IxTTTAL Studies ix Amertcan Letters. 

Newport, but then an unfashionable resort among the Berk- 
shire hills. Whatever obscurity may have hung over Haw- 
thorne hitherto was effectually dissolved by this powerful 
tale, which was as vivid in coloring as the implication of its 
title. Hawthorne chose for his background the somber life 
of the early settlers of New England. He had always been 
drawn toward this part of American history, and in Tioice- 
Tokl Tales had given some illustrations of it in Midicotfs 
Red Cross and Legends of the Province House. Against 
this dark foil moved in strong relief the figures of Hester 
Prj-nne, the woman taken in adultery; her paramour, the 
Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale; her husband, old Roger Chilling- 
worth; and her illegitimate child. In tragic power, in its 
grasp of the elementary passions of human nature and its 
deep and subtle insight into the inmost secrets of the heart, 
this is Hawthorne's greatest book. He never crowded his 
canvas with figures. In the Blithedale Homance and the 
Marhle Faun there is the same parti carre or group of four 
characters. In the House of the Seven Gables there are five. 
The last mentioned of these, published in 1852, was of a 
more subdued intensity than the Scarlet Letter, but equally 
original, and, upon the whole, perhaps equally good. The 
BUthedale Romance, published in the same year, though not 
strikingly inferior to the others, adhered more to conventional 
patterns in its plot and in the sensational nature of its end- 
ing. The suicide of the heroine by drowning, and the terri- 
ble scene of the recovery of her body, were suggested to the 
author by an experience of his own on Concord River, the 
account of which, in his own words, may be read in Julian 
Utiwihome' & N'athaniel Haiothorne and His Wife. In 1852 
Hawthorne returned to Concord and bought the " Wayside " 
property, which he retained until his death. But in the fol- 
lowing year his old college friend Pierce, now become Presi- 
dent, appointed him consul to Liverpool, and he went abroad 
for seven years. The most valuable fruit of his foreign resi- 



The Concord Writers. 110 

dence was the romance of the Marble Faun^ 1860, the longest 
of his fictions and the richest in descriptive beauty. The 
theme of this was the development of the soul through the 
experience of sin. There is a haunting mystery thrown 
about the story, like a soft veil of mist, veiling the begin- 
ning and the end. There is even a delicate teasing sugges- 
tion of the preternatural in Donatello, the Faun, a creation 
as original as Shakespeare's Caliban or Fouque's Undine, and 
yet quite on this side the border-line of the human. Our 
Old Home, a book of charming papers on England, was pub- 
lished in 1863. Manifold experience of life and contact with 
men, affording scope for his always keen observation, had 
added range, fullness, warmth to the imaginative subtlety 
which had manifested itself even in his earliest tales. Two 
admirable books for children, the Wonder Book and Tangle- 
wood Tales, in which the classical mythologies were retold, 
should also be mentioned in the list of Hawthorne's writings, 
as well as the American, English, and Italian Note Hooks, 
the first of which contains the seed-thoughts of some of his 
finished works, together with hundreds of hints for plots, 
episodes, descriptions, etc., which he never found time to 
work out. Hawthorne's style, in his first sketches and sto- 
ries a little stilted and " bookish," gradually acquired an ex- 
quisite perfection, and is as well worth study as that of any 
prose classic in the English tongue. 

Hawthorne was no transcendentalist. He dwelt much in 
a world of ideas, and he sometimes doubted whether the 
tree on the bank or its image in the stream were the more 
real. But this had little in common with the philosophical 
idealism of his neighbors. He reverenced Emei'son, and he 
held kindly intercourse — albeit a silent man and easily bored 
— with Thoreau and Ellery Channing, and even with Mar- 
garet Fuller. But his sharp eyes saw whatever was whim- 
sical or weak in the apostles of the new faith. He had 
little enthusiasm for causes or reforms, and among so many 



120 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

Abolitionists he remained a Democrat, and even wrote a 
campaign life of his friend Pierce. 

The village of Concord has perhaps done more for Amer- 
ican literature than the city of New York. Certainly there 
are few places where associations, both patriotic and poetic, 
cluster so thickly. At one side of the grounds of the Old 
Manse — which has the river at its back — runs down a shaded 
lane to the Concord monument and the figure of the Minute 
Man and the successor of " the rude bridge that arched the 
flood." Scarce two miles away, among the woods, is little 
Walden — " God's drop." The men who made Concord 
famous are asleep in Sleepy Hollow, yet still their memory 
prevails to draw seekers after truth to the Concord Summer 
School of Philosophy, which met annually, a few years since, 
to reason high of "God, Freedom, and Immortality," next 
door to the " Wayside," and under the hill on whose ridge 
Hawthorne wore a path as he paced up and down beneath 
the hemlocks. 



1. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Nature. TJie American Scholar. 
Literary Ethics. The Transcendentalist. The Over-soul. 
Address before the Cambridge Divinity School. English 
Traits. Representative Men. Poenns. 

2. Henry David Thoreau. Excursions. Walden. A 
Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers. Cape Cod. 
The Maine Woods. 

3. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Mosses from an Old Manse. 
The Scarlet Letter. The House of the Seven Gables. The 
Blithedale Roinance. The Marble Faun. Our Old Home. 

4. Transcendentalism in New England. By O. B. Froth- 
ingham. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1875. 



The Cambbidgb Scholaes. 121 



CHAPTER V. 

THE CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS. 
1837-1861. 

With few exceptions, the men who have made American 
literature what it is have been college graduates. And yet 
our colleges have not commonly been, in themselves, literary 
centers. Most of them have been small and poor, and sit- 
uated in little towns or provincial cities. Their alumni 
scatter far and wide immediately after graduation, and even 
those of them who may feel drawn to a life of scholarship 
or letters find little to attract them at the home of their 
alma mater, and seek by preference the larger cities, where 
periodicals and publishing houses offer some hope of sup- 
port in a literary career. Even in the older and better 
equipped universities the faculty is usually a corps of work- 
ing scholars, each man intent upon his specialty and rather 
inclined to undervalue merely " literary " performance. In 
many cases the fastidious and hypercritical tura of mind 
which besets the scholar, the timid conservatism which nat- 
urally characterizes an ancient seat of learning, and the 
spirit of theological conformity which suppresses free dis- 
cussion, have exerted their benumbing influence upon the 
originality and creative impulse of their inmates. Hence it 
happens that, while the contributions of American college 
teachers to the exact sciences, to theology and philology, 
metaphysics, political philosophy, and the severer branches 
of learning have been honorable and important, they have as 
a class made little mark upon the general literature of the 
country. The professors of literature in our colleges are 



122 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

usually pei'sons who have made no additions to literature, and 
the professors of rhetoric seem ordinarily to have been selected 
to teach students how to write for the reason that they them- 
selves have never written any thing that any one has ever read. 
To these remarks the Harvard College of some fifty years 
ago offers some striking exceptions. It was not the large 
and fashionable university that it has lately grown to be, 
with its multiplied elective courses, its numerous faculty, and 
its somewhat motley collection of undergraduates; but a 
small school of the classics and mathematics, with something 
of ethics, natural science, and the modern languages added to 
its old-fashioned, scholastic curriculum, and with a very homo- 
geneous clientUe, drawn mainly f i-om the Unitarian families of 
eastern Massachusetts. Nevertheless a finer intellectual life, in 
many respects, was lived at old Cambridge within the years 
covered by this chapter than nowadays at the same place, or 
at any date in any other American university town. The 
neighborhood of Boston, where the commercial life has never 
so entirely overlain the intellectual as in New York and 
Philadelphia, has been a standing advantage to Harvard 
College. The recent upheaval in religious thought had 
secured toleration and made possible that free and even 
audacious interchange of ideas without which a literary at- 
mosphere is impossible. From these, or from whatever 
causes, it happened that the old Harvard scholai'ship had an 
elegant and tasteful side to it, so that the dry erudition of 
the schools blossomed into a generous culture, and there 
were men in the professors' chairs who were no less efficient 
as teachers because they were also poets, orators, wits, and 
men of the Avorld. In the seventeen years from 1821 to 1839 
there were graduated from Harvard College Emerson, 
Holmes, Sumner, Phillips, Motley, Thoreau, Lowell, and 
Edward Everett Hale; some of whom took up their resi- 
dence at Cambridge, others at Boston, and others at Con- 
cord, which was quite as much a spiritual suburb of Boston 



The Cambridge Scholars. 123 

as Cambridge was. In 1836, when Longfellow became 
professor of modern languages at Harvard, Sumner was 
lecturing in the Law School. The following year — in which 
Thoreau took his bachelor's degree — witnessed the delivery 
of Emerson's Phi Beta Kappa lecture on the Anierican 
Scholar in the college chapel, and Wendell Phillips's speech on 
the Murder of Lovejoy in Faneuil Hall. Lowell, whose de- 
scription of the impression produced by the former of these 
famous addresses has been quoted in a previous chapter, was 
an under-graduate at the time. He took his degree in 1838, 
and in 1855 succeeded Longfellow in the chair of modern 
languages. Holmes had been chosen in 1847 professor of 
anatomy and physiology in the Medical School — a position 
which he held until 1882. The historians, Prescottand Ban- 
croft, had been graduated in 1814 and 1817 respectively. The 
former's first important publication, Ferdinand and Isabella, 
appeared in 1837. Bancroft had been a tutor in the college in 
1822-23, and the initial volume of his History of the United 
States was issued in 1835. Another of the Massachusetts 
school of historical writers, Francis Parkman, took his first 
degree at Harvard in 1844. Cambridge was still hardly 
more than a village, a rural outskirt of Boston, such as 
Lowell described it in his article, Cambridge Thirty Years 
Ago, originally contributed to Putnam'' s Monthly in 1853, 
and afterward reprinted in his Fireside Travels, 1864. The 
situation of a university scholar in old Cambridge was thus 
an almost ideal one. Within easy reach of a great city, 
with its literary and social clubs, its theaters, lecture 
courses, public meetings, dinner-parties, etc., he yet lived 
withdrawn in an academic retirement among elm-shaded 
avenues and leafy gardens, the dome of the Boston State- 
house looming distantly across the meadows where the 
Charles laid its "steel blue sickle" upon the variegated, 
plush-like ground of the Avide marsh. There was thus, at 
all times during the quarter of a century embraced between 



124 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

1837 and 1861, a group of brilliant men resident in or about 
Cambridge and Boston, meeting frequently and intimately, 
and exerting upon one another a most stimulating influence. 
Some of the closer circles — all concentric to the university — 
of which this group was loosely composed were laughed at 
by outsiders as " Mutual Admiration Societies." Such was, 
for instance, the "Five of Clubs," whose members were 
Longfellow, Sumner, C. C. Felton, professor of Greek at 
Harvard, and afterward president of the college; G. S. Hil- 
lard, a graceful lecturer, essayist, and poet, of a somewhat 
amateurish kind; and Henry R. Cleveland, of Jamaica Plain, 
a lover of books and a writer of them. 

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-82), the most 
widely read and loved of American poets — or, indeed, of all 
contemporary poets in England and America — though iden- 
tified with Cambridge for nearly fifty years, was a native of 
Portland, Maine, and a graduate of Bowdoin College, in the 
same class with Hawthorne. Since leaving college, in 1825, 
he had studied and traveled for some years in Europe, and 
had held the professorship of modern languages at Bowdoin. 
He had published several text-books, a number of articles on 
the Romance languages and literatures in the North Ameri- 
can Meview, a thin volume of metrical translations from the 
Spanish, a few original poems in various periodicals, and the 
pleasant sketches of European travel entitled Outre-Mer. 
But Longfellow's fame began with the appearance in 1839 of 
his Voices of the NigJit. Excepting an earlier collection by 
Bryiint this was the first volume of real poetry published in 
New England, and it had more warmth and sweetness, a 
greater richness and variety, than Bryant's work ever pos- 
sessed. Longfellow's genius was almost feminine in its flex- 
ibility and its sympathetic quality. It readily took the 
color of its surroundings and opened itself eagerly to impres- 
sions of the beautiful from every quarter, but especially from 
books. This first volume contained a few things written 



The Cambridge Scholars. 125 

during his student days at Bowdoin, one of which, a blank- 
verse piece on Autumn, clearly shows the influence of Bry- 
ant's Thanatopsis. Most of these juvenilia had nature for 
their theme, but they were not so sternly true to the New 
England landscape as Thoreau or Bryant. The skylark and 
the ivy appear among their scenic propei'ties, and in the 
best of them, Woods in Winter, it is the English "haw- 
thorn " and not any American tree, through which the gale 
is made to blow, just as later LongfelloAV uses " rooks " in- 
stead of crows. The young poet's fancy was instinctively 
putting out feelers tOAvard the storied lands of the Old 
World, and in his Hymn of the Moravian Nuns of Bethle- 
hem he transformed the rude church of the Moravian sisters 
to a cathedral with " glimmering tapers," swinging censers, 
chancel, altar, cowls, and " dim mysterious aisle." After his 
visit to Europe Longfellow returned deeply imbued with 
the spirit of romance. It was his mission to refine our na- 
tional taste by opening to American readers, in their own 
vernacular, new springs of beauty in the literatures of for- 
eign tongues. The fact that this mission was interpretive, 
rather than creative, hardly detracts from Longfellow's true 
originality. It merely indicates that his inspiration came to 
him in the first instance from other sources than the common 
life about him. He naturally began as a translator, and this 
first volume contained, among other things, exquisite render- 
ings from the German of XJhland, Salis, and Milller, from the 
Danish, French, Spanish, and Anglo-Saxon, and a few i)as- 
sages from Dante. Longfellow remained all his life a trans- 
lator, and in subtler ways than by direct translation he infused 
the fine essence of European poetry into his own. lie loved 

" Tales that have the rime of age 
And chronicles of eld." 

The golden light of romance is shed upon his page, and it is 
his habit to borrow mediaeval and Catholic imagery from his 



126 Initial Studies in Amebic an Letters. 

favorite Middle Ages, even when writing of American 
subjects. To him the clouds are hooded friars, that 
"tell their beads in drops of rain;" the midnight winds 
blowing through woods and mountain passes are chanting 
solemn masses for the repose of the dying year, and the 
strain ends with the prayer — 

" Kyrie, eleyson, 
Ohriste, eleyson." 

In his journal he wrote characteristically: "The black shad- 
ows lie upon the grass like engravings in a book. Autumn 
has written his rubric on the illuminated leaves, the wind 
turns them over and chants like a friar." This in Cambridge, 
of a moonshiny night, on the first day of the American Octo- 
ber ! But several of the pieces in Voices of the iW^Ai sprang 
more immediately from the poet's own inner experience. 
The Hymn to the Night, the Psalm of Life, The Reaper and 
the Flowers, Footsteps of Angels, The Light of Stars, and The 
Beleaguered City spoke of love, bereavement, comfort, pa- 
tience, and faith. In these lovely songs, and in many others 
of the same kind which he afterward wrote, Longfellow 
touched the hearts of all his countrymen. America is a 
country of homes, and Longfellow, as the poet of sentiment 
and of the domestic affections, became and remains far more 
general in his appeal than such a " cosmic " singer as Whit- 
man, who is still practically unknown to the " fierce democ- 
racy " to which he has addressed himself. It would be hard 
to overestimate the influence for good exerted by the tender 
feeling and the pure and sweet morality which the hundreds 
of thousands of copies of Longfellow's writings, that have 
been circulated among readers of all classes in America and 
England, have brouglit with them. 

Three later collections. Ballads and Other Poems, 1842; 
The Belfry of Bruges, 1846; and The Seaside andthe Fireside, 
1850, comprise most of what is noteworthy in Longfellow's 



The Cambridge Scholars. 127 

minor poetry. The first of these embraced, together with 
some renderings from the German and tlie Scandinavian lan- 
guages, specimens of stronger original work than the author 
had yet put forth; namely, the two powerful ballads of The 
Skeleton in Armor and The Wreck of the Hesperus. The 
former of these, written in the swift leaping meter of Dray- 
ton's Ode to the Cambro Britons on their Harp, was sug- 
gested by the digging up of a mail-clad skeleton at Fall 
River — a circumstance which the poet linked with the tradi- 
tions about the Round Tower at Newport, thus giving to the 
whole the spirit of a Norse viking song of war and '^f the 
sea. The Wreck of the Hesp 7'us was occasioned by the 
news of shipwrecks on "the coast near Gloucester and by the 
name of a reef — "Norman's Woe" — where many of them 
took place. It was Avintten one night between twelve and 
three, and cost the poet, he said, " hardly an effort." Indeed, 
it is the spontaneous ease and grace, the unfailing taste of 
Longfellow's lines, which are their best technical quality. 
There is nothing obscure or esoteric about his poetry. If 
there is little passion or intellectual depth, there is always 
genuine poetic feeling, often a very high order of imagina- 
tion, and almost invariably the choice of the right word. In 
this volume were also included The Village Blacksmith and 
Excelsior. The latter, and the Psalm of Life, have had a 
" damnable iteration " which causes them to figure as Long- 
fellow's most popular pieces. They are by no means, however, 
among his best. They are vigorously expressed common- 
places of that hortatory kind which passes for poetry, but is, 
in reality, a vague species of preaching. 

In The Belfry of Bruges and The Seaside and the Fireside 
the translations were still kept up, and among the original 
pieces were The Occultation of Orion — the most imaginative 
of all Longfellow's poems; Seaioeed, which has very noble 
stanzas, the favorite Old Clock on the Stairs, The Building 
of the Ship, with its magnificent closing apostrophe to the 



128 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

Union, and The Fire of Driftwood, the subtlest in feeling of 
any thing that the poet ever wrote. With these were verses 
of a more familiar quality, such as The Bridge, Resignation, 
and The Day Is Done, and many others, all reflecting moods 
of gentle and pensive sentiment, and drawing from analo- 
gies in nature or in legend lessons which, if somewhat ob- 
vious, were expressed with perfect art. Like Keats, he ap- 
prehended every thing on its beautiful side. Longfellow 
Avas all poet. Like Ophelia in Hamlet, 

" Thought aud affection, passion, hell itself, 
He turns to favor and to prettiness." 

He cared very little about the intellectual movement of the 
age. The transcendental ideas of Emerson passed over his 
head and left him undisturbed. For politics he had that 
gentlemanly distaste which the cultivated class in America 
had already begun to entertain. In 1842 he printed a small 
volume of Poems on Slavery, which drew commendation from 
his friend Sumner, but had nothing of the fervor of Whit- 
tier's or Lowell's utterances on the same subject. It is inter- 
esting to compare his journals with Hawthorne's American 
Note DooJcs, and to observe in what very different ways the 
two writers made prey of their daily experiences for literary 
material. A favorite haunt of Longfellow's was the bridge 
between Boston and Cambridgeport, the same which he put 
into verse in his poem. The Bridge. "I always stop on the 
bridge," he writes in his journal; "tide waters are beautiful. 
From the ocean uj) into the land they go, like messengers, to 
ask why the tribute has not been jsaid. The brooks and 
rivers answer that there has been little liarvest of snow and 
rain this year. Floating sea- weed and kelp is carried up into 
the meadows, as returning sailors bring oranges in bandanna 
handkerchiefs to friends in the country." And again: "We 
leaned for a while on the wooden rail and enjoyed the silvery 
reflection on the sea, making sundry comparisons. Among 



The Cambridge Sciiolaks. 129 

other thoughts we had this cheering one, that the whole sea 
was flashing with this heavenly light, though we saw it only 
in a single track; the dark waves are the dark providences 
of God; luminous, though not to us; and even to ourselves 
in another position." " Walk on the bridge, both ends of 
which are lost in the fog, like human life midway between 
two eternities; begiiiiiing and ending in mist." In Haw- 
thorne an allegoric meaning is usually something deeper and 
subtler than this, and seldom so openly expressed. Many of 
Longfellow's poems — the Beleaguered City, for example — 
may be definitely divided into two parts; in the first, a story 
is told or a natural phenomenon described; in the second, 
the spiritual apj)lication of the parable is formally set forth. 
This method became with him almost a trick of style, and 
his readers learn to look for the hmc fahula docet at the 
end as a matter of course. As for the 2^1'e vailing optimism 
in Longfellow's view of life — of which the above passage is 
an instance — it seems to be in him an affair of temperament, 
and not, as in Emerson, the result of philosophic insight. Per- 
haps, however, in the last analysis optimism and pessimism 
are subjective — the expression of temperament or individual 
experience, since the facts of life are the same, whether seen 
through Sclioj)enhauer's eyes or through Emerson's. If there 
is any particular in which Longfellow's inspiration came to 
him at first hand and not through books, it is in respect to 
the aspects of the sea. On this theme no American poet has 
written more beautifully and with a keener sympathy than the 
author of The Wreck of the Hesperus and of Seaweed. 

In 1847 was published the long poem of Evangeline. 
The story of the Acadian peasant girl, who was separated 
from her lover in the dispersion of her people by the English 
troops, and after weary wanderings and a life-long search, 
found him at last, an old man dying in a Philadelphia hos- 
pital, was told to Longfellow by the Rev. H. L. Conolly, who 
had previously suggested it to Hawthorne as a subject for a 



130 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

story. Longfellow, cliaracteristically enough, "got up" the 
local color for his poem from Haliburton's account of the 
dispersion of the Grancl-Pre Acadians, from Darby's Geo- 
graphical Description of Louisiana and "Watson's Annals of 
Philadelphia. He never needed to go much outside of his 
library for literary impulse and material. Whatever may be 
held as to Longfellow's inventive powers as a creator of char- 
acters or an interpreter of American life, his originality as an 
artist is manifested by his successful domestication in Evan- 
geline of the dactylic hexameter, which no English poet had 
yet used with effect. The English poet, Arthur Hugh 
Clough, who lived for a time in Cambridge, followed Long- 
fellow's example in the use of hexameter in his Botkie of 
Toher-na- Vuolich, so that we have now arrived at the time 
— a proud moment for American letters — when the works of 
our writers began to react upon the literature of Europe. 
But the beauty of the descriptions in Evangeline and the 
pathos — somewhat too drawn out — of the story made it 
dear to a multitude of readers who cared nothing about the 
technical disputes of Poe and other critics as to whether 
or not Longfellow's lines were sufficiently "spondaic" to 
represent truthfully the quantitative hexameters of Homer 
and Vergil. 

In 1855 appeared Hiawatha, Longfellow's most aboriginal 
and " American " book. The tripping trochaic measure he 
borrowed from the Finnish epic Kalevala. The vague, 
child-like mythology of the Indian tribes, with its anthropo- 
morphic sense of the brotherhood between men, animals, and 
the forms of inanimate nature, he took from Schoolcraft's 
Algic Researches, 1839. He fixed forever, in a skillfully 
chosen poetic form, the more inward and imaginative part of 
Indian character, as Cooper had given permanence to its ex- 
ternal and active side. Of Longfellow's dramatic experi- 
ments, the Golden Legend, 1851, alone deserves mention 
here. This was in his chosen realm; a tale taken from the 



The Cambbidge Scholars. 131 

ecclesiastical annals of the Middle Ages, precious with mar- 
tyrs' blood and bathed in the rich twilight of the cloister. 
It contains some of his best work, but its merit is rather 
jjoetic than dramatic, although Ruskin praised it for the 
closeness with which it entered into the temper of the 
monk. 

Longfellow has pleased the people more than the critics. 
He gave freely what he had, and the gift was beautiful. 
Those who have looked in his poetry for something else than 
poetry, or for poetry of some other kind, have not been slow 
to assert that he was a lady's poet — one who satisfied callow 
youths and school-girls by uttering commonplaces in grace- 
ful and musical shape, but who offered no strong meat for 
men. Miss Fuller called his poetry thin, and the poet him- 
self — or, rather, a portrait of the poet which frontispieced 
an illustrated edition of his works — a " dandy Pindar." 
This is not true of his poetry, or of the best of it. But 
he had a singing and not a talking voice, and in his prose 
one becomes sensible of a certain weakness. Hyperion, 
for example, published in 1839, a loitering fiction, inter- 
spersed with descriptions of European travel, is, upon the 
whole, a weak book, overflowery in diction and sentimental 
in tone. 

The crown of Longfellow's achievements as a translator 
was his great version of Dante's Dlvina Commedia, published 
between 1867 and 1870. It is a severely literal, almost a line 
for line, rendering. The meter is preserved, but the rhyme 
sacrificed. If not the best English poem constructed from 
Dante, it is at all events the most faithful and scholarly para- 
phrase. The sonnets which accompanied it are among Long- 
fellow's best work. He seems to have been raised by daily 
communion with the great Tuscan into a habit of deeper 
and more subtle thought than is elsewhere common in his 
poetry. 

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809- ) is a native of Cam- 



132 Ijj^itial Studies in AMEBicAisr Letters. 

bridge and a graduate of Harvard in the class of '29; a class 
whose anniversary reunions he has celebrated in something 
like forty distinct poems and songs. For sheer cleverness 
and versatility Dr. Holmes is, perhaps, unrivaled among 
American men of letters. He has been poet, wit, humorist, 
novelist, essayist, and a college lecturer and Avriter on medical 
topics. In all of these dei^artments he has produced work 
Avhich ranks high, if not with the highest. His father, Dr. 
Abiel Holmes, was a graduate of Yale and an orthodox min- 
ister of liberal temper, but the son early threw in his lot with 
the Unitarians; and, as Avas natural to a man of satiric turn 
and with a very human enjoyment of a fight, whose youth 
was cast in an age of theological controversy, he has always 
had his fling at Calvinism, and has prolonged the slogans of 
old battles into a later generation; sometimes, perhaps, in- 
sisting upon them rather wearisomely and beyond the limits 
of good taste. He had, even as an undergraduate, a reputation 
for cleverness at writing comic verses, and many of his good 
things in this kind, such as the Dorcliester Giant and the 
Height of the Hidiculous, were contributed to the Collegian, 
a students' paper. But he first drew the attention of a wider 
public by his spirited ballad of Old Ironsides — 

" Ay ! Tear her tattered ensign down! " — 

composed about 1830, when it was proposed by the govern- 
ment to take to pieces the unseaworthy hulk of the famous 
old man-of-war, Constitution. Holmes's indignant protest 
— which has been a favorite subject for school-boy declama- 
tion — had the effect of postponing the vessel's fate for a 
great }nany years. From 1830-35 the young poet was pur- 
suing his medical studies in Boston and Paris, contributing 
now and then some verses to the magazines. Of his life as a 
medical student in Paris there are many pleasant reminis- 
cences in his Autocrat and other writings, as Avliere he tells, 
for instance, of a dinner-party of Americans in the French 



The Cambridge Scholars. 138 

capital, where one of the company brought tears of home- 
sickness into the eyes of his sodales by saying that tlie tinkle 
of the ice in the champagne-glasses reminded him of the 
cow-bells in the rocky old pastures of New England. In 183C 
he printed his first collection of poems. The volume contained, 
among a number of pieces broadly comic, like the September 
Gale, the 3fusic Grinders, and the Ballad of the Oyster man 
— which at once became widely popular — a few poems of a 
finer and quieter temper, in which there was a quaint blend- 
ing of the humorous and the pathetic. Such were 3fi/ Aunt 
and the Last Leaf- — which Abraham Lincoln found " inex- 
pressibly touching," and which it is difficult to read without 
the double tribute of a smile and a tear. The volume con- 
tained also Poetry : A Metrical Essay, read before the Har- 
vard Chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, which was the 
first of that long line of capital occasional poems which 
Holmes has been sjjinning for half a century with no sign of 
fatigue and with scarcely any falling off in freshness; poems 
read or spoken or sung at all manner of gatherings, public 
and private, at Harvard commencements, class days, and 
other academic anniversaries; at inaugurations, centennials, 
dedications of cemeteries, meetings of medical associations, 
mercantile libraries. Burns clubs, and New England societies; 
at rural festivals and city fairs; openings of theaters, layings 
of corner - stones, birthday celebrations, jubilees, funerals, 
commemoration services, dinners of welcome or farewell to 
Dickens, Bryant, Everett, Whittier, Longfellow, Grant, 
Fai-ragut, the Grand Duke Alexis, the Chinese embassy, and 
what not. Probably no j^oet of any age or clime has written 
so much and so well to order. He has been particularly 
happy in verses of a convivial kind, toasts for big civic 
feasts, or post-prandial rhymes for the petit comite — the snug 
little dinners of the chosen few; his 

" The quaint trick to cram tlie pithy line 
That cracks so crisply over bubbling wine," 



134 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

And although he could write on occasion a Song for a 
Temperance Dinner, he has preferred to chant the praise of 
the punch bowl and to 

"feel the old convivial glow (unaided) o'er me stealing, 
The warm, champagnj^, old-partieular-braudy-puncliy feeling." 

It would be impossible to enumerate the many good things 
of this sort which Holmes has written, full of Avit and wis- 
dom, and of humor lightly dashed with sentiment and 
sparkling with droll analogies, sudden puns, and unexpected 
turns of rhyme and jihrase. Among the best of them are 
Nux Postcoenatica, A Modest Request, Ode for a Social 
Meeting, The Boys, and i?/p Van Winkle, M.D. Holmes's 
favorite measure, in his longer poems, is the heroic couplet 
which Pope's example seems to have consecrated forever to 
satiric and didactic verse. He writes as easily in this meter 
as if it were prose, and with much of Pope's epigrammatic 
neatness. He also manages with facility the anapa^stics of 
Moore and the ballad stanza which Hood had made the vehi- 
cle for his drolleries. It cannot be expected that verses 
manufactured to pojj with the corks and fizz with the cham- 
pagne at academic banquets should much outlive the occasion; 
or that the habit of producing such verses on demand should 
foster in the producer that " high seriousness " which Matthew 
Arnold asserts to be one mark of all great poetry. Holmes's 
poetry is mostly on the colloquial level, excellent society- 
verse, but even in its serious moments too smart and too 
pretty to be taken very gravely; with a certain glitter, 
knowingness, and flippancy about it, and an absence of that 
self-forgetfulness and intense absorption in its theme which 
characterize the work of the higher imagination. Tliis is 
rather the product of fancy and wit. Wit, indeed, in the 
old sense of quickness in the perception of analogies, is the 
staple of his mind. His resources in the way of figure, illus- 
tration, allusion, and anecdote are wonderful. Age cannot 



The Cambridge Scholars. 135 

wither him uor custom stale his infinite variety, and there is 
as much powder in his latest pyrotechnics as in the rockets 
which he sent up half a century ago. Yet, though the hu- 
morist in him rather outweighs the poet, he has written a few 
things, like the Chambered Nautilus and Honiesich in, 
Heaven, which are as purely and deeply poetic as the One- 
Hoss Shay and the Prologue are funny. Dr. Holmes is not 
of the stuff of which idealists and enthusiasts are made. As 
a physician and a student of science, the facts of the mate- 
rial universe have counted for much with him. His clear, 
positive, alert intellect was always impatient of mysticism. 
He had the sharp eye of the satirist and the man of the 
world for oddities of dress, dialect, and manners. ITatu- 
rally the transcendental movement struck him on its hidicrous 
side, and in his After-Dinner Poem^ read at the Phi Beta 
Kappa dinner at Cambridge in 1843, he had his laugh at the 
"Orphic odes" and "runes" of the bedlamite seer and 
bard of mystery 

" Who rides a beetle which he calls a * sphinx.' 

And wliat questions asked in club-foot rhyme 

Of Earth the tongueless, and the deaf-mute Time I 

Here babbling ' Insight ' shouts in Nature's ears 

His last conundrum on the orbs and spheres; 

There Self-inspection sucks its little thumb, 

With ' Whence am I ? ' and ' Wherefore did I come ? ' " 

Curiously enougli, the author of these lines lived to write 
an appreciative life of the poet who wrote the Sphinx. 
There was a good deal of toryism or social conservatism 
in Plolmes. He acknowledged a preference for the man 
with a pedigree, the man who owned family portraits, 
had been brought up in familiarity with books, and 
could pronounce " view " correctly. Readers unhappily 
not of the " Brahmin caste of New England " have 
sometimes resented as snobbishness Holmes's harping on 
" family," and his perpetual application of certain favorite 



186 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

shibboleths to other people's ways of epeecli. " The woman 
who calculates is lost." 

" Learning condemns beyond the reach of hope 

The careless lips that speak of soap for soap. . . . 

Do put your accents in the proper spot; 

Don't, let me beg you, don't say ' How? ' for ' What ?' 

The tilings named ' pants ' in certain documents, 

A word not made for gentlemen, but 'gents.* " 

With the rest of " society " he was disposed to ridicule 
the abolition movement as a crotchet of the eccentric and 
the long-haired. But when the civil war broke out he lent 
his pen, his tongue, and his own flesh and blood to the cause 
of the Union. The individuality of Holmes's writings comes 
in part from their local and provincial bias. He has been 
the laureate of Harvard College and the bard of Boston city, 
an urban poet, with a cockneyish fondness for old Boston 
ways and things — the Common and the Frog Pond, Faneuil 
Hall and King's Chapel and the Old South, Bunker Hill, 
Long Wharf, the Tea Party, and the town crier. It was 
Holmes wlio invented the playful saying that " Boston State- 
house is the hub of the solar system." 

In 1857 was started the Atlcmtlc Morithly^ a magazine 
which has published a good share of the best work done by 
American writers within the past generation. Its immedi- 
ate success was assured by Dr. Holmes's brilliant series of 
^^2i^Qx%^ihQ Autocrat of the Breakfast Tahle, 1858, followed 
at once by the Professor at the Hreahfast Table, 1859, and 
later by the Poet at the Breakfast Tahle, 1873. The Auto- 
crat is its author's masterpiece, and holds the fine quintes- 
sence of his humor, his scholarship, his satire, genial ob- 
servation, and ripe experience of men and cities. The form 
is as unique and original as the contents, being something 
between an essay and a drama; a succession of monologues 
or table-talks at a typical American boarding-house, with a 



The Cambridge Scholars. 137 

thread of story running through the whole. The variety of 
mood and thought is so great that these conversations never 
tire, and the pi'ose is intei'spersed witli some of the autlior's 
choicest verse. The Professor at the Breakfast Table fol- 
lowed too closely on the heels of the AiUocrat, and had less 
freshness. The third number of the series was better, and 
was pleasantly reminiscent and slightly garrulous, Dr. 
Holmes being now (1873) sixty-four years old, and entitled 
to the gossiping privilege of age. The person?iel of the 
Breakfast Table series, such as the landlady and the landlady's 
daughter and her son, Benjamin Franklin; the schoolmistress 
the young man named John, the Divinity Student, the Kohi- 
noor, the Sculpin, the Scarabaeus, and the Old Gentleman who 
sits oj)posite, are not fully drawn characters, but outlined 
figures, lightly sketched — as is the Autocrat's wont— by 
means of some trick of speech, or dress, or feature, but they 
are quite life-like enough for their purpose, which is mainly 
to furnish listeners and foils to the eloquence and wit of the 
chief talker. 

In 1860 and 1867 Holmes entered the field of fiction with 
two "medicated novels," JSlsie Veivier and the Guardian 
Angel. The first of these was a singular tale, wliose heroine 
united with her very fascinating liuman attributes some- 
thing of the nature of a serpent; her mother having been 
bitten by a rattlesnake a few months before the birth of the 
girl, and kept alive meauAvhile by the use of powerful anti- 
dotes. The heroine of the Guardian Angel inherited law- 
less instincts from a vein of Indian blood in her ancestry. 
These two books were studies of certain medico-psycholog- 
ical problems. They preached Dr. Holmes's favorite doc- 
trines of heredity and of the modified nature of moral re- 
sponsibility by reason of transmitted tendencies which limit 
the freedom of the will. In Jilsie Ven?ier, in particular, the 
Aveirdly imaginative and speculative character of the lead- 
ing motive suggests Hawthorne's method in fiction, but the 



138 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

background and the subsidiary figures have a realism that is 
in abrupt contrast witli this, and gives a kind of doubleness 
and want of keeping to the whole. The Yankee characters, 
in particular, and the satirical pictures of New England 
country life are oj^en to the charge of caricature. In the 
Guardian Angel the figure of Byles Gridley, the old scholar, 
is drawn with thorough sympathy, and though some of his 
acts are improbable, he is, on the whole, Holmes's most vital 
conception in the region of dramatic creation. 

James Russell Lowell (1819- ), the foremost of Amevican 
critics and of living American poets, is, like Holmes, a native 
of Cambridge, and, like Emerson and Holmes, a clergyman's 
son. In 1855 he succeeded Longfellow as professor of mod- 
ern languages in Harvard College. Of late years he has 
held important diplomatic posts, like Everett, Irving, Ban- 
croft, Motley, and other Americans distinguished in letters, 
having been United States minister to Spain, and, under two 
administrations, to the court of St. James. Lowell is not so 
spontaneously and exclusively a poet as Longfellow, and his 
popularity Avith the average reader has never been so great. 
His appeal has been to the few rather than the many, to an 
audience of scholars and of the judicious rather than to the 
" groundlings " of the general public. Nevertheless his verse, 
though without the evenness, instinctive grace, and unerring 
good taste of Longfellow's, has more energy and a stronger 
intellectual fiber, while in prose he is very greatly the su- 
perior. His first volume, A Year's Life, 1841, gave some 
promise. In 1843 he started a magazine, the Pioneer, which 
only reached its third number, though it counted among its 
contributors Hawthorne, Poe, Whittier, and Miss Barrett 
(afterward Mrs. Browning). A second volume of poems, 
printed in 1844, showed a distinct advance, in such pieces as 
the Shepherd of King Admetus, Jihoecus, a classical myth, 
told in excellent blank verse, and the same in subject with 
one of Landor's polished intaglios; and the Z,egetid of -Brit- 



The Cambridge Scholars. 139 

tany, a narrative poem, which had line passages, but no 
firmness in the management of the story. As yet, it was ev- 
ident, the young poet had not found his theme. This came 
with tlie outbreak of the Mexican War, which was unpopular 
in New England, and which the Free Soil party regarded as 
a slave-holders' war waged without provocation against a 
sister republic, and simply for the purpose of extending the 
area of slavery. 

In 1846, accordingly, the Bigloio Papers began to appear 
in the Boston Courier, and were collected and published in 
book form in 1848. These were a series of rhymed satires 
upon the government and the war party, written in the Yan- 
kee dialect, and supposed to be the work of Hosea Biglow, a 
home-spun genius in a down-east country town, whose letters 
to the editor were indorsed and accompanied by the com- 
ments of the Rev. Homer Wilbur, A.M., pastor of the First 
Church in Jaalam, and (prospective) member of many learned 
societies. The first paper was a derisive address to a recruit- 
ing sergeant, with a denunciation of the "nigger-drivin' 
States '' and the " Northern dough-faces ; " a plain hint that 
the North would do better to secede than to continue 
doing dirty work for the South; and an expression of 
those universal peace doctrines which were then in the 
air, and to which Longfellow gave serious utterance in 
his OccuUation of Orion. 

" Ez for war, I call it murder — • 

There you hev it plain an' flat: 
I don't want to go no furder 

Than my Testyment for that ; 
God hez said so plump an' fairly, 

It's as long as it is broad, 
An' you've gut to git up airly 

Ef j^ou want to take in God." 

The second number was a versified paraphrase of a letter re- 
ceived from Mr. Birdofredom Sawin, " a yung feller of our 



140 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

town that was cussed fool enuff to goe atrottin inter Miss 
Chiff arter a drum and fife," and who finds when he gets to 
Mexico that 

*• This kind o' sogerin' aint a mite like our October trainin'." 

Of the subsequent papers the best was, perhajjs. What 3fr. 
Hobinson Thinks, an election ballad, which caused universal 
laughter, and was on every body's tongue. 

The Biglow Papers remain Lowell's most original contri- 
bution to American literature. They are, all in all, the best 
political satires in the language, and unequaled as portraitures 
of the Yankee character, with its cuteness, its homely wit, 
and its latent poetry. Under the racy humor of the dialect 
— which became in Lowell's hands a medium of literary ex- 
pression almost as eilective as Burns's Ayrshire Scotch — 
burned that moral jnthusiasm and that hatred of wrong and 
deification of duty — " Stern daughter of the voice of God " 
— which, in the tough New England stock, stands instead of 
the passion in the blood of southern races. Lowell's serious 
poems on political questions, such as the Present Crisis, Ode 
to Freedom, and the Capture of Fugitive Slaves, have the old 
Puritan fervor, and such lines as 

"They are slaves who dare not be 
In the right with two or three," 

and the passage beginning 

" Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne," 

became watchwords in the struggle against slavery and dis- 
union. Some of these Avere published in his volume of 1848 
and the collected edition of his poems, in two volumes, issued 
in 1850. These also included his most ambitious narrative 
poem, the Vision of Sir lAiunfal, an allegorical and spiritual 
treatment of one of the legends of the Holy Grail. Lowell's 



The Cambridge Scholars. 141 

genius was not epical, but lyric and didactic. The merit 
of Sir Launfal is not in the tolling of the story, but in 
the beautiful descriptive episodes, one of which, com- 
mencing, 

" And what is so rare as a day in June? 
Then if ever come perfect days," 

is as current as any thing that he has written. It is signifi- 
cant of the lack of a natural impulse toward narrative inven- 
tion in Lowell that, unlike Longfellow and Holmes, he never 
tried his hand at a novel. One of the most important parts 
of a novelist's equipment he certainly possesses, namely, 
an insight into character and an ability to delineate it. 
This gift is seen es2)ecially in his sketch of Parson Wilbur, 
who edited the Bigloio Papers with a delightfully pedantic 
introduction, glossary, and notes; in the prose essay On a 
Certain Condescension in Foreigners, and in the uncom- 
pleted poem, Fitz Adani's Story. See also the sketch of 
Captain Underhill in the essay on JSFeio Fngland Two Cent- 
uries Ago. 

The Bigloio Pajiers when brought out in a volume were 
prefaced by imaginary notices of the press, including a capi- 
tal parody of Carlyle, and a reprint from the " Jaalam Inde- 
pendent Blunderbuss," of the first sketch — afterward ampli- 
fied and enriched — of that perfect Yankee idyl, The Courtin^. 
Between 1862 and 1865 a second series of Bigloio Pajiers 
appeared, called out by the events of the civil war. Some 
of these, as, for instance, Jonathan to John, a remon- 
strance with England for her unfriendly attitude toward the 
North, were not inferior to any thing in the earlier series; 
and others were even superior as poems, equal, indeed, in 
pathos and intensity to any thing that Lowell has written 
in his professedly serious verse. In such passages the 
dialect wears rather thin, and there is a certain incongru- 
ity between the rustic spelling and the vivid beauty and 



142 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

power and the figurative cast of the phrase in stanzas 
like the following: 

" Wut's words to them wliose faith an' truth 

On war's red techstone rang true metal, 
Who ventered life an' love an' youtli 

For the gret prize o' death in battle ? 
To him who, deadly hurt, agen 

Plashed on afore the cliarge's thunder, 
Tippin' with fire the bolt of men 

That rived the rebel line asunder?" 

Charles Sumner, a somewhat heavy person, with little sense 
of humor, wished that the author of the Bigloxo Papers 
" could have used good English." In the lines just quoted, 
indeed, the bad English adds nothing to the effect. In 1848 
Lowell wrote A Fable for Critics, something after the style 
of Sir John Suckling's Session of the Poets; a piece of rollick- 
ing doggerel in which he surveyed the American Parnassus, 
scattering about headlong fun, sharp satire, and sound crit- 
icism in equal proportion. Never an industrious workman, 
like LongfelloM', at the poetic craft, but preferring to wait 
for the mood to seize him, he allowed eighteen years to go 
by, from 1850 to 1868, before publishing another volume of 
verse. In the latter year appeared Under the Willoics, which 
contains some of his ripest and most perfect work, notably 
A Winter Evening Hymn to my Fire, with its noble and 
touching close — suggested by, perhaps, at any rate recalling, 
the dedication of Goethe's Faust, 

" Ihr naht euch wieder, schwanlcende Gestalten; " 

the subtle Footpath and In the Twilight, the lovely little 
poems Auf Wiedersehen and After the Funeral, and a num- 
ber of spirited political pieces, such as Villa F'anca and the 
Washers of the Shrorid. This volume contained also his Ode 
Recited at the Harvard Commemoration in 1865. This, 



The Cambridge Scholars, 143 

although uneven, is one of the finest occasional poems in the 
language, and the most important contribution which our 
civil war has made to song. It was charged with the grave 
emotion of one who not only shared the patriotic grief and 
exultation of his ahna mater in the sacrifice of her sons, but 
who felt a more personal sorrow in the loss of kindred of 
his own, fallen in the front of battle. Particularly note- 
worthy in this memorial ode are the tribute to Abra- 
ham Lincoln, the third strophe beginning, "Many loved 
Truth;" the exordium, "O Beautiful! my Country! ours 
once more! " and the close of the eighth strophe, where the 
poet chants of the youthful heroes who 

" Come transfigured back, 
Secure from change in their high-hearted ways, 
Beautiful evermore and vvilli the rays 
Of morn on their white Shields of Expectation." 

From 1857 to 1862 Lowell edited the Atlantic Monthly, and 
from 1863 to 1872 the North American Reviexo. His prose, 
beginning with an early volume of Conversations on Some 
of the Old Poets, 1844, has consisted mainly of critical es- 
says on individual writers, such as Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, 
Emerson, Shakespeare, Thoreau, Pope, Carlyle, etc., together 
with papers of a more miscellaneous kind, like 'Witchcraft, 
New England Two Centuries Ago, My Garden Acquaint- 
ance, A Good Word for Winter, Abraham Lincoln, etc., 
etc. Two volumes of these were published in 1870 and 
1876, under the title Among My Rooks, and another, My 
Study Windoxos, in 1871. As a literary critic Lowell ranks 
easily among the first of living w^riters. His scholarship is 
thorough, his judgment keen, and he poui's out upon his 
page an unwithholding wealth of knowledge, humor, wit, 
and imagination from the fullness of an overflowing mind. 
His prose has not the chastened correctness and " low tone " 
of Matthew Arnold's. It is rich, exuberant, and sometimes 



144 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

overfanciful, running away into excesses of allusion or fol- 
lowing the lead of a chance pun so as sometimes to lay itself 
open to the charge of pedantry and bad taste. Lowell's re- 
sources in the way of illustration and compai'ison are endless, 
and the readiness of his wit and his delight in using it put 
many temptations in his way. Purists in style accordingly 
take offense at his saying that " Milton is the only man who 
ever got much poetry out of a cataract, and that was a cat- 
aract in his eye ; " or of his speaking of " a gentleman for 
whom the bottle before him reversed the wonder of the 
stereoscope and substituted the Gascon v for the b in binocu- 
lar," which is cei'tainly a puzzling and roundabout fashion 
of telling us that he had drunk so much that he saw double. 
The critics also find fault with his coining such words as 
" undisprivacied," and with his writing such lines as the fa- 
mous one — from The Cathedral, 1870 — 

" Spume-slidiug down the baffled decuman." 

It must be acknowledged that his style lacks the crowning 
grace of simplicity, but it is precisely by reason of its allu- 
sive quality that scholarly readers take pleasure in it. They 
like a diction that has stuff in it and is woven thick, and 
where a thing is said in such a way as to recall many other 
things. 

Mention should be made, in connection with this Cam- 
bridge circle, of one writer who touched its circumference 
briefly. This was Sylvester Judd, a graduate of Yale, who 
entered the Harvard Divinity School in 1837, and in 1840 
became minister of a Unitarian church in Augusta, Maine. 
Judd published several books, but the only one of them at 
all rememberable was Margaret, 1845, a novel of which 
Lowell said, in A Fable for Critics, that it was " the first 
Yankee book with the soul of Down East in it." It was 
very imperfect in point of art, and its second part — a rliap- 
sodical description of a sort of Unitarian Utopia — is quite 



The Cambridge Scholars. 145 

unreadable. But iu the delineation of the few chief charac- 
ters and of the rude, wild life of an outlying New England 
township just after the close of the Revolutionary War, as 
well as in the tragic power of the catastrophe, there was 
genius of a high order. 

As the country has grown older and more populous, and 
works in all departments of thought have multiplied, it be- 
comes necessary to draw more strictly the line between the 
literature of knowledge and the literature of power. Polit- 
ical history, in and of itself, scarcely falls within the limits 
of this sketch, and yet it cannot be altogether dismissed, for 
the historian's art, at its highest, demands imagination, nar- 
rative skill, and a sense of unity and proportion in the selec- 
tion and arrangement of his facts, all of which are literary 
qualities. It is significant that many of our best historians 
have begun authorship in the domain of imaginative litera- 
ture: Bancroft with an early volume of poems; Motley with 
his historical romances. Merry Mount and 3forton''s Hope ; 
and Parkman with a novel, Vassall Morton. The oldest of 
that modern group of writers that have given America an 
honorable position in the historical literature of the world 
was William Hickling Prescott (1796-1859). Prescott chose 
for his theme the history of the Spanish conquests in the 
New World, a subject full of romantic incident and suscep- 
tible of that glowing and perhaps slightly overgorgeous col- 
oring which he laid on with a liberal hand. His completed 
histories, in their order, are the Reign of Ferdinand and 
Isabella, 1837; the Conquest of Mexico, 1843 — a topic which 
Irving had relinquished to him; and the Conquest of Peru, 
1847. Prescott was fortunate in being born to leisure and 
fortune, but he had difficulties of another kind to overcome. 
He was nearly blind, and had to teach himself Spanish and 
look up authorities through the help of others, and to write 
with a noctograph or by amanuenses, 

George Bancroft (1800-91) issued the first volume of his 
10 



146 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

great History of the United States in 1834, and exactly half a 
century later the final volume of the work, bringing the 
subject down to 1789. Bancroft had studied at Gottingen, 
and imbibed from the German historian Heeren the scientific 
method of historical study. He had access to original 
sources, in the nature of collections and state papers in the 
governmental archives of Europe, of which no American 
had hitherto been able to avail himself. His history, in 
thoroughness of treatment, leaves nothing to be desired, and 
has become the standard authority on the subject. As a lit- 
erary performance merely, it is somewhat wanting in flavor, 
Bancroft's manner being heavy and stiff when compared with 
Motley's or Parkman's. The historian's services to his coun- 
try have been publicly recognized by his successive appoint- 
ments as secretary of the navy, minister to England, and 
minister to Germany. 

The greatest, on the whole, of American historians was 
John Lothrop Motley (1814-77), Avho, like Bancroft, was a 
student at Gottingen and United States minister to England. 
His Rise of the Dutch Mepublic, 1856, and History of the 
Z^'^i/^ec? iVe^Aer?«?z<:?5, j^ublished in installments from 1861 to 
1868, equaled Bancroft's work in scientific thoroughness and 
philosophic grasp, and Prescott's in the picturesque brill- 
iancy of the narrative, while it excelled them both in its 
masterly analysis of great historic characters, reminding the 
reader, in this particular, of Macaulay's figure-painting. 
The episodes of the siege of Antwerp and the sack of the 
cathedral, and of the defeat and wreck of the Spanish Ar- 
mada, are as graphic as Prescott's famous description of 
Cortez's capture of the city of Mexico ; while the elder his- 
torian has nothing to compare with Motley's vivid personal 
sketches of Queen Elizabeth, Philip the Second, Henry of 
Navarre, and William the Silent. The Life of John of 
Barneveld, 1874, completed this series of studies upon the 
history of the Netherlands, a theme to which Motley was 



TuE Cambridge Scholars. 147 

attracted because the heroic struggle of the Dutch for liberty 
oflFered, in some respects, a parallel to the growth of political 
independence in Anglo-Saxon communities, and especially in 
his own America. 

The last of these Massachusetts historical writers whom we 
shall mention is Francis Parkman (1823- ), whose subject 
has the advantage of being thoroughly American. His Ore- 
gon Trail, 1847, a series of sketches of prairie and Rocky 
Mountain life, originally contributed to the Knickerbocker 
Magazine, displays his early interest in the American In- 
dians. In 1851 appeared his first historical work, the Con- 
spiracy of Pontiac. This has been followed by the series 
entitled France and England in North America, the six 
successive parts of which are as follows: the Pioneers of 
France in the New 'World; the Jesuits in North America; 
La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West; the Old Re- 
gime in Canada; Count Frontenac and New France; and 
Montcalm and Wolfe. These narratives have a wonderful 
vividness, and a romantic interest not inferior to Cooper's 
novels, Parkman made himself personally familiar with the 
scenes which he described, and some of the best descriptions 
of American woods and waters are to be found in his histo- 
ries. If any fault is to be found with his books, indeed, it 
is that their picturesqueness and " fine writing " are a little 
in excess. 

The political literature of the years from 1837 to 1861 
hinged upon the antislavery struggle. In this " irrepressible 
conflict" Massachusetts led the van. Garrison had written 
in his Liberator, in 1830, " I will be as harsh as truth and as 
uncompromising as justice. I am in earnest; I will not 
equivocate ; I will not excuse ; I will not retreat a single 
inch; and I will be heard." But the Garrisonian abolition- 
ists remained for a long time, even in the North, a small 
and despised faction. It was a great point gained when 
men of education and social standing, like Wendell Phillips 



148 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

(1811-84) and Charles Sumner (1811-74), joined themselves 
to the cause. Both of these were graduates of Harvard 
and men of scholarly pursuits. They became the repi'e- 
sentative orators of the antislavery party, Phillips on the 
l)latform and Sumner in the Senate. The former first came 
before the public in his fiery speech, delivered in Faneuil 
Hall December 8, 1837, before a meeting called to denounce 
the murder of Lovejoy, who had been killed at Alton, 111., 
while defending his press against a pro-slavery mob. 
Thenceforth Phillips's voice was never idle in behalf of the 
slave. His eloquence was impassioned and direct, and his 
English singularly pure, simple, and nervous. He is perhaps 
nearer to Demosthenes than any other American orator. He 
was a most fascinating platform speaker on themes outside 
of politics, and his lecture on the Lost Arts was a favorite 
with audiences of all sorts. 

Sumner was a man of intellectual tastes, who entered pol- 
itics reluctantly and only in obedience to the resistless lead- 
ing of his conscience. He was a student of literature and 
art; a connoisseur of engravings, for example, of which he 
made a valuable collection. He was fond of books, conver- 
sation, and foreign travel, and in Europe, while still a young 
man, had made a remarkable impression in society. But he 
left all this for public life, and in 1851 was elected as Web- 
ster's successor to the Senate of the United States. There- 
after he remained the leader of the abolitionists in Congress 
until slavery was abolished. His influence throughout the 
North was greatly increased by the brutal attack upon him 
in the Senate chamber in 1856 by "Bully Brooks " of South 
Carolina. Sumner's oratory was stately and somewhat 
labored. While speaking he always seemed, as has been 
wittily said, to be surveying a " broad landscape of his own 
convictions." His most impressive qualities as a speaker 
were his intense moral earnestness and his thorough knowl- 
edge of his subject. The most telling of his parliamentary 



The Cambridge Scholars. 149 

speeches are perhaps his speech On the ICansas- Nebraska 
Bill, of February 3, 1854, and On the Crime against Kansas, 
May 19 and 20, 1856; of his platform addresses, the oration 
on the 7}nie Grandeur of Nations. 



1. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Voices of the Night. 
Tlie Skeleton in Armor. The Wreck of the Hesperus. The 
Village Blacksmith. The Belfry of Bruges, and Other 

Poems (1846). By the Seaside. Hiawatha. Tales of a 
Wayside Inn. 

2. Oliver Wendell Holmes. Autocrat of the Breakfast 
Table. Elsie Yenner. Old Ironsides. The Last Leaf 
My Aunt. The Music- Grinders. On Lending a Bunch- 
Bowl. Nux Postcoenatica. A Modest Bequest. The Liv- 
ing Temple. Meeting of the Alumni of Harvard College. 
Homesick in Heaven. Epilogue to the Breakfast Table /Se- 
ries. The Boys. Dorothy Q. The Iron Gate. 

3. James Russell Lowell. The Biglow Papers (two series). 
Under the Willows, and Other Poems (1868). Bhoecus. 
The Shepherd of King Admetus. The Vision of Sir 
Launfal. The Present Crisis. The Dandelion. The Birch 
Tree. Beaver Brook. Essays on Chaucer. Shakesp>eare 
Once More. Dryden. Emerson, the Lecturer. Thoreau. 
My Garden Acquaintance. A Good Word for Winter. A 
Certain Condescension in Foreigners. 

4. William Hickling Prescott. The Conquest of Mexico. 

5. John Lothrop Motley. The United Netherlands. 

6. Francis Parkman. The Oregon Trail. The Jesuits in 
North America. 

1. Representative American Orations, volume v. Edited 
by Alexander Johnston. New York: G. P. Putnam's 
Sons. 1884. 



150 Initial Studies ix American Letters. 



CHAPTER VI. 

LITERATURE IN THE CITIES. 

183V-1861. 

Literature as a profession has hardly existed in the 
United States until very recently. Even now the number of 
those who support themselves by purely literary work is 
small, although the growth of the reading public and the 
establishment of great magazines, such as Harper's, the Cent- 
ury, and the Atlantic, have made a market for intellectual 
wares which forty years ago would have seemed a godsend 
to poorly paid Bohemians like Poe or obscure men of genius 
like Hawthorne. About 1840, two Philadelphia magazines — 
Godey''s Lady^s Booh and GrahanCs Monthly — ^began to 
pay their contributors twelve dollars a page, a price then 
thought wildly munificent. But the first magazine of the 
modern type was Harper'' s Monthly, founded in 1850. 
American books have always suffered, and still continue to 
suffer, from the want of an international copyright, which 
has flooded the country with cheap reprints and translations 
of foreign works, with which the domestic product has been 
unable to contend on such uneven terms. With the first 
ocean steamers there started up a class of large-paged weeklies 
in New York and elsewhere, such as JBrother Jonathan, the 
N^eio World, and the Corsair, which fuz-nished their readers 
with the freshest writings of Dickens and Bulwer and other 
British celebrities within a fortnight after their appearance 
in London. This still further restricted the profits of native 
authors and nearly drove them from the field of periodical 
literature. By special arrangement the novels of Thackeray 



Lttebatuee in the Cities. 151 

and other English writers were printed in Harper's in in- 
stallments simultaneously with their issue in English period- 
icals. The Atlantic was the first of our magazines which 
Avas founded expressly for the encouragement of home talent, 
and which had a purely Yankee flavor. Journalism was the 
profession which naturally attracted men of letters, as hav- 
ing most in common with their chosen work and as giving 
them a medium, under their own control, through which 
they could address the public. A few favored scholars, like 
Prescott, were made independent by the possession of private 
fortunes. Others, like Holmes, Longfellow, and Lowell, 
gave to literature such leisure as they could get in the in- 
tervals of an active profession or of college work. Still 
others, like Emerson and Thoreau, by living in the country 
and making their modest competence — eked out in Emer- 
son's case by lecturing here and there — suffice for their sim- 
ple needs, secured themselves freedom from the restraints of 
any regular calling. But, in default of some such joow sto, our 
men of letters have usually sought the cities and allied them- 
selves with the press. It will be remembered that Lowell 
started a short-lived magazine on his own account, and that 
lie afterward edited the Atlantic and the NortJi Arne?-ican. 
Also that Ripley and Charles A. Dana betook themselves to 
journalism after the break-up of the Brook Farm Community. 
In the same way William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878), the 
earliest American poet of importance, whose impulses drew 
him to the solitudes of nature, was compelled to gain a 
livelihood by conducting a daily newspaper; or, as he him- 
self puts it, was 

'' Forced to drudge for the dregs of men, 
And scrawl strange words with the barbarous pen." 

Bryant was born at Cummington, in Berkshire, the western- 
most county of Massachusetts. After two years in Williams 
College he studied law, and practiced for nine years as a 



152 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

country lawyer in Plainfield and Great Barringtoii. Follow- 
ing tbe line of the Housatonic Valley, the social and theo- 
logical affiliations of Berkshire have always been closer with 
Connecticut and New York than Avith Boston and eastern 
Massachusetts. Accordingly, when in 1825 Bryant yielded 
to the attractions of a literary career, he betook himself to 
New York city, where, after a brief experiment in conduct- 
ing a monthly magazine, the New Yorh Mevieio and Athenceum, 
he assumed the editorship of the Evening Post, a Democratic 
and free-trade journal, with which he remained connected 
till his death. He already had a reputation as a poet when 
he entered the ranks of metropolitan journalism. In 1816 
his Thanatopsis had been published in the North Amei'ican 
Mevieio, and had attracted immediate and general admira- 
tion. It had been finished, indeed, two years before, when 
the poet was only in his nineteenth year, and was a wonder- 
ful instance of priecocity. The thought in this stately hymn 
was not that of a young man, but of a sage who has reflected 
long upon the uniA'ersality, the necessity, and the majesty 
of death. Bryant's blank verse when at its best, as in Than- 
atopsis and the Forest Ilymn^ is extremely noble. In grav- 
ity and dignity it is surpassed by no English blank verse of 
this century, though in rich and various modulation it falls 
below Tennyson's Ulysses and Morte d"* Arthur, It was 
characteristic of Bryant's limitations that he came thus early 
into possession of his faculty. His range was always a nar- 
row one, and about his poetry, as a whole, there is a certain 
coldness, rigidity, and solemnity. His fixed position among 
American poets is described in his own Hymn to the North 

Star : 

" And thou dost see them rise, 

Star of the pole ! aud thou dost see them set. 
Alone, in thy cold skies, 

Thou keep'st thy old, unmoviug station yet, 
Nor join'st the dances of that glittering traiu, 
Nor dipp'at thy virgin orb in the blue western main." 



Literature in the Cities. 153 

In 1821 he read The Ages, a didactic poem, in thirty-five 
stanzas, before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, 
and in the same year brought out his first volume of poems. 
A second collection aj)peared in 1832, which was printed in 
London under the auspices of Washington Irving. Bryant 
was the first American poet who had much of an audience in 
England, and Wordsworth is said to have learned Thana- 
topsis by heart. Bryant was, indeed, in a measure, a scholar 
of Wordsworth's school, and his place among American 
poets corresponds roughly, tliough not precisely, to Words- 
worth's among English poets. With no humor, with some- 
what restricted sympathies, with little flexibility or openness 
to new impressions, but gifted with a high, austere imagina- 
tion, Bryant became the meditative poet of nature. His 
best poems are those in which he draws lessons from nature, 
or sings of its calming, purifying, and bracing influences 
upon the human soul. His oftice, in other words, is the same 
which Matthew Arnold asserts to be the peculiar oflice of 
modern poetry, " the moral interpretation of nature." Poems 
of this class are Green River, To a Water-fowl, June, the 
Death of the Flowers, and the Evening Wind. The song, 
" O fairest of the rural maids," which has more fancy than 
is common in Bryant, and which Poe pronounced his best 
poem, has an obvious resemblance to Wordsworth's " Three 
years she grew in sun and shade," and both of these nameless 
pieces might fitly be entitled — as Wordsworth's is in Mr. 
Palgrave's Golden Treasury — " The Education of Nature." 

Although Bryant's career is identified with New York his 
poetry is all of New England. His heart was always turn- 
ing back fondly to the woods and streams of the Berkshire 
hills. There was nothing of that ui'ban strain in him which 
appears in Holmes and Willis. He was, in especial, the poet 
of autumn, of the American October and the New England In- 
dian Summer, that season of " dropping nuts " and " smoky 
light," to whose subtle analogy with the decay of the young 



154 Initial Studies in American Lettees. 

by the New England disease, consumption, lie gave sucli 
tender expression in the Death of the Flovjers, and amid 
whose "bright, late quiet" he wished himself to pass away. 
Bryant is our poet of " the melancholy days," as Lowell is 
of June. If, by chance, he touches upon June, it is not with 
the exultant gladness of Low^ell in meadows full of bobolinks, 
and in the summer day that is 

" simply perfect from its own resource, 
As to the bee the new campanula's 
Illuminate seclusion swung in air." 

Rather, the stir of new life in the clod suggests to Bryant by 
contrast the thought of death; and there is nowhere in his 
poetry a passage of deeper feeling than the closing stanzas of 
June, in which he speaks of himself, by anticipation, as of one 

" Whose part in all the pomp that fills 
The circuit of the summer hills 
Is — that his grave is green." 

Bryant is, par excellence, the poet of New England wild 
flowers, the yellow violet, the fringed gentian — to each of 
which he dedicated an entire poem — the orchis and the 
golden-rod, " the aster in the wood and the yellow sunflower 
by the brook." With these his name will be associated as 
Wordsworth's with the daffodil and the lesser celandine, and 
Emerson's with the rhodora. 

' Except when' writing of nature he was apt to be common- 
place, and there are not many such energetic lines in his purely 
reflective verse as these famous ones from The B attle- Field : 

"Truth crushed to earth shall rise again; 

The eternal years of God are hers ; 
But Error, wounded, writhes in pain, 

And dies among his worshipers." 

He added but slowly to the number of his poems, publishing 
a new collection in 1840, another in 1844, and Thirty Poems 



Literature in the Cities. 155 

in 1864, His work at all ages was remarkably even. Thana- 
topsis was as mature as any thing that he wrote afterward, 
and among his later pieces the Planting of the Apple Tree 
and the Flood of Years were as fresh as any thing that 
he had written in the first flush of youth. Bryant's poetic 
style was always pure and correct, without any tincture 
of afiectation or extravagance. His prose writings are not 
important, consisting mainly of papers of the Salmagundi 
variety contributed to the Talisman, an annual published in 
1827-30; some rather sketchy stories, Tales of the Glauber 
Spa, 1832; and impressions of Europe, entitled Letters of a 
Traveler, issued in two series, in 1849 and 1858. In 1869 
and 1871 appeared his blank-verse translations of the Iliad 
and Odyssey, a remarkable achievement for a man of his 
age, and not excelled, upon the whole, by any recent met- 
rical version of Homer in the English tongue. Bryant's 
half-century of service as the editor of a daily paper 
should not be overlooked. The Evening Post, under his 
management, was always honest, gentlemanly, and cour- 
ageous, and did much to raise the tone of journalism in 
New York. • 

Another Massachusetts poet, who was outside the Boston 
coterie, like Bryant, and, like him, tried his hand at journal- 
ism, was John Greenleaf Whittier (1807- ). He was born 
in a solitary farm-house near Haverhill, in the valley of the 
Merrimack, and his life has been passed mostly at his native 
place and at the neighboring town of Amesbury. The local 
color, which is very pronounced in his poetry, is that of the 
Merrimack from the vicinity of Haverhill to its mouth at 
Newbury port, a region of hill-side farms, opening out below 
into wide marshes — " the low, green prairies of the sea," and 
the beaches of Hampton and Salisbury. The scenery of the 
Merrimack is familiar to all readers of Whittier: the cotton- 
spinning towns along its banks, with their factories and 
dams, the sloping pastures and orchards of the back country, 



156 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

the sands of Plum Island and the level reaches of water 
meadow between which glide the broad-sailed " gundalows " 
— a local corruption of gondola — laden with hay. Whittier 
was a farmer lad, and had only such education as the district 
school could supply, supplemented by two years at the Hav- 
erhill Academy. In his School Days he gives a pictui'e of 
the little old country school-house as it used to be, the only 
alma mater of so many distinguished Americans, and to 
which many others who have afterward trodden the pave- 
ments of great universities look back so fondly as to their 
first wicket gate into the land of knowledge. 

" Still sits the school-house by the road, 

A ragged beggar sunning ; 
Around it still the sumachs grow 

And blackberry vines are running. 

"Within the master's desk is seen, 

Deep-scarred by raps official ; 
The warping floor, the battered seats, 

The jack-knife's carved initial." 

A copy of Burns awoke the slumbering instinct in the 
young poet, and he began to contribute verses to Garrison's 
Free Press, published in Newburyport, and to the Haverhill 
Gazette. Then he went to Boston, and became editor for a 
short time of the Manufacturer. Next he edited the Essex 
Gazette, at Haverhill, and in 1830 he took charge of George 
D. Prentice's paper, the N'eio, England Weekly Review, at 
Hartford, Conn. Here he fell in with a young Connecticut 
poet of much promise, J. G. C. Brainard, editor of the Connect- 
icut Mirror, whose " Remains " Whittier edited in 1832. At 
Hartford, too, he published his first book, a volume of prose 
and verse, entitled Legends of New England, 1831, which 
is not otherwise remarkable than as showing his early inter- 
est in Indian colonial traditions — especially those which had 
a touch of the supernatural — a mine which he afterward 



Literature in the Cities. 157 

worked to good purpose in the Bridal of PenjiacooJc, the 
Witch's Daughter, and similar poems. Some of the Legends 
testify to Brainard's influence and to the influence of Whit- 
tier's temporary" residence at Hartford. One of the prose 
pieces, for example, deals with the famous " Moodus Noises " 
at Haddam, on the Connecticut River, and one of the poems 
is the same in subject with Brainard's Black Fox of Salmon 
Biver. After a year and a half at Hartford Whittier re- 
turned to Haverhill and to farming. 

The antislavery agitation was now beginning, and into 
this he threw himself with all the ardor of his nature. He 
became the poet of the reform as Garrison was its apostle, 
and Sumner and Phillips its speakers. In 1833 he published 
Justice and Expediency, a prose tract against slavery, and 
in the same year he took part in the formation of the Amer- 
ican Antislavery Society at Philadelphia, sitting in the con- 
vention as a delegate of the Boston abolitionists. Whittier 
was a Quaker, and that denomination, influenced by the 
preaching of John Woolman and others, had long since 
quietly abolished slavery within its own communion. The 
Quakers of Philadelphia and elsewhere took an earnest 
though peaceful part in the Garrisonian movement. But it 
was a strange irony of fate that had made the fiery-hearted 
Whittier a Friend. His poems against slavery and disunion 
have the martial ring of a Tyrtseus or a Korner, added to 
the stern religious zeal of Cromwell's Ironsides. They are 
like the sound of the trumpet blown before the walls of Jer- 
icho, or the psalms of David denouncing woe upon the 
enemies of God's chosen people. If there is any purely 
Puritan strain in American poetry it is in the war-hymns of 
the Quaker "Hermit of Amesbury." Of these patriotic 
poems there were three principal collections: Voices of Free- 
dom, 1849; The Panorama, and Other Poems, 1856; and In 
War Time, 1863. Whittier's work as the poet of freedom 
was done when, on hearing the bells ring for the passage 



158 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

of the constitutional amendment abolishing slavery, he wrote 
his splendid Laus Deo, tlirilling with the ancient Hebrew 
spirit: 

" Loud and long 
Lift the old exulting song, 
Sing with Miriam by the sea — 
He has cast the mighty down, 

Horse and rider sink and drown, 
He hath triumphed gloriously." 

Of his poems distinctly relating to the events of the civil 
war, the best, or at all events the most popular, is Barbara 
Frietchie. Ichahod, expressing the indignation of the Free 
Soilers at Daniel Webster's seventh of March speech in de- 
fense of the Fugitive Slave Law, is one of Whittier's best 
political poems, and not altogether unworthy of comparison 
with Browning's Lost Leader. The language of Whittier's 
warlike lyrics is biblical, and many of his purely devotional 
pieces are religious poetry of a high order and have been in- 
cluded in numerous collections of hymns. Of his songs of 
faith and doubt, the best are perhaps Our Master, Chapel of 
the Hermits, and Eternal Goodness; one stanza from the 
last of which is familiar: 

" I know not where his islands lift 

Their fronded palms in air, 
I only know I cannot drift 

Beyond his love and care." 

But from politics and war Whittier turned gladly to sing 
the homely life of the New England country -side. His rural 
ballads and idyls are as genuinely American as any thing 
that our poets have written, and have been recommended, 
as such, to English working-men by Whittier's co-religionist, 
John Bright. The most popular of these is probably Maud 
Midler, whose closing couplet has passed into proverb. 
Skipper Ireson's Hide is also very current. Better than 



Literature in the Cities. 159 

either of them, as poetry, is Telling the Bees. But Whittier's 
masterpiece in work of a descriptive and reminiscent kind 
is Snow-Bound, 1866, a New Engfand fireside idyl which 
in its truthf uhiess recalls the Winter Evening of Cowper's 
Task and Burns's Cotter'' s Saturday Night, but in sweetness 
and animation is superior to either of them. Although in 
some things a Puritan of the Puritans, Whittier has never 
forgotten that he is also a Fi-iend, and several of his ballads 
and songs have been upon the subject of the early Quaker per- 
secutions in Massachusetts. The most impressive of these 
is Cassa?idra SouthwicJc. The latest of them, the Kimfs 
3fissive, originally contributed to the 3femorial History of 
Boston in 1880, and reprinted the next year in a volume 
with other poems, has been the occasion of a rather lively 
controversy. The Bridal of Pennacook, 1848, and the Tent 
on the Beach, 1867, which contain some of his best work, 
Avere series of ballads told by different narrators, after the 
fashion of Longfellow's Tales of a Wayside Inn. As an 
artist in verse, Whittier is strong and fervid, rather than 
delicate or rich. He uses only a few metrical forms — by 
preference the eight-syllabled rhyming couplet — 

" Maud Muller on a summer's day- 
Raked the meadow sweet with hay," etc. 

and the emphatic tramp of this measure becomes very monot- 
onous, as do some of Whittier's mannerisms, which proceed, 
liOAvever, never from affectation, but from a lack of study 
and variety, and so, no doubt, in part from the want of that 
academic culture and thorough technical equipment which 
Lowell and Longfellow enjoyed. Though his poems are not 
in dialect, like Lowell's Biglow Papers, he knows how to 
make an artistic use of homely provincial words, such as 
" chore," which give his idyls of the hearth and the barn- 
yard a genuine Doric cast. Whittier's prose is inferior to 
his verse. The fluency which was a besetting sin of his 



160 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

poetry, when released from the fetters of rhyme and meter, 
ran into wordiness. His j^rose writings were partly contri- 
butions to the slavery controversy, partly biographical 
sketches of English and American reformers, and partly 
studies of tlie scenery and folk-lore of the Merrimack Valle3^ 
Those of most literary interest were the Supernaturalism of 
New England, 1847, and some of the papers in Literary Rec- 
reations and Miscellanies, 1854. 

While Massachusetts was creating an American literature 
other sections of the Union were by no means idle. The 
West, indeed, was as yet too raw to add any thing of impor- 
tance to the artistic product of the country. The South was 
hampered by circumstances which will presently be de- 
scribed. But in and about the sea-board cities of New York, 
Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Richmond many pens were 
busy filling the columns of literary weeklies and monthlies; 
and there was a considerable output, such as it was, of books 
of poetry, fiction, travel, and miscellaneous light literature. 
Time has already relegated most of these to the dusty toji 
shelves. To rehearse the names of the numerous contributors 
to the old Knickerbocker Magazine, to Godey's, and Gra- 
hani's, and the New Mirror, and the Southern Literary 
Messenger, or to run over the list of authorlings and poetas- 
ters in Poe's papers on the Literati of New York, would be 
very much like reading the inscriptions on the head-stones 
of an old grave-yard. In the columns of these prehistoric 
magazines and in the book notices and reviews away back in 
the thirties and forties, one encounters the handiwork and 
the names of Emerson, Holmes, Longfellow, Hawthorne, and 
Lowell embodied in this mass of forgotten literature. It 
would have required a good deal of critical acumen, at the 
time, to predict that these and a few others would soon be 
thrown out into bold relief, as the significant and permanent 
names in the literature of their generation, while Paulding, 
Hirst, Fay, Dawes, Mrs. Osgood, and scores of others who 



LiTEKATURE IN THE CiTIES. 161 

figured beside them in tlie fashionable periodicals, and filled 
quite as large a space in the public eye, would sink into ob- 
livion in less than thirty years. Some of these latter were 
clever enough people; they entertained their contemporary 
public sufficiently, but their work had no vitality or " power 
of continuance." The great majority of the writings of any 
period are necessarily ephemeral, and time by a slow process 
of natural selection is constantly sifting out the few repre- 
sentative books which shall carry on the memory of the pe- 
riod to posterity. Now and then it may be predicted of 
some undoubted work of genius, even at the moment that it 
sees the light, that it is destined to endure. But tastes and 
fashions change, and few things are better calculated to in- 
spire the literary critic with humility than to read the proph- 
ecies in old reviews and see how the future, now become the 
present, has quietly given them the lie. 

From among the professional litterateurs of his day emerges, 
with ever sharper distinctness as time goes on, the name of 
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49). By the irony of fate Poe was 
born at Boston, and his first volume, Tamerlane, and Other 
Poems, 1827, was printed in that city and bore upon its title- 
page the words, " By a Bostonian." But his parentage, so far 
as it was axiy thing, was Southern. His father was a Mary lander 
who had gone upon the stage and married an actress, herself 
the daughter of an actress and a native of England. Left an 
orphan by the early death of both parents, Poe was adopted 
by a Mr. Allan, a wealthy merchant of Richmond, Va. He 
was educated partly at an English school, was student for a 
time in the University of Virginia, and afterward a cadet in 
the Military Academy at West Point. His youth was wild 
and irregular: he gambled and drank, was proud, bitter, and 
perverse; finally quarreled with his guardian and adopted 
father — by whom he was disowned — and then betook himself 
to the life of a literary hack. His brilliant but underpaid 
work for various periodicals soon brought him into notice, 
11 



162 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

and he was given the editorship of the Southern lAterary 
Messenger, published at Richmond, and subsequently of the 
Gentlemen'' s — afterward GraJiMn's — Magazine in Phila- 
delphia. These and all other positions Poe forfeited through 
his dissipated habits and wayward temper, and finally, in 
1844, he drifted to New York, Avhere he found employment 
on the Evening Mirror and then on the Broadtoay Journal. 
He died of delirium tremens at the Marine Hospital in Balti- 
more. His life was one of the most wretched in literary his- 
tory. He was an extreme instance of what used to be called 
the "eccentricity of genius." He had the irritable vanity 
which is popularly supposed to accompany the poetic tem- 
})erament, and was so insanely egotistic as to imagine that 
Longfellow and others were constantly plagiarizing from 
him. The best side of Poe's character came out in his do- 
mestic relations, in which he displayed great tenderness, pa- 
tience, and fidelit3\ His instincts were gentlemanly, and his 
manner and conversation were often winning. In the place 
of moral feeling he had the artistic conscience. In his crit- 
ical papers, except where warped by passion or prejudice, 
he showed neither fear nor favor, denouncing bad work by 
the most illustrious hands and commending obscure merit. 
The "impudent literary cliques" who puffed each other's 
books; the feeble chirr upings of the bardlings who manu- 
factured verses for the "Annuals; " and the twaddle of the 
" genial " incapables who praised them in flabby reviews — 
all these Poe exposed with ferocious honesty. Nor, though 
his writings are wwmoral, can they be called in any sense iin- 
moral. His poetry is as pure in its unearthliness as Bryant's 
in its austerity. 

By 1831 Poe had published thi'ee thin books of verse, none 
of which had attracted notice, although the latest contained 
the drafts of a few of his most perfect poems, such as Israfel, 
the Valley of Unrest, the City in the Sea, and one of the 
two pieces inscribed To Helen. It was his habit to touch 



Literature in the Cities. 163 

and retouch his work until it grew under his more practiced 
hand into a shape that satisfied his fastidious taste. Hence 
the same poem frequently re-appears in different stages of 
development in successive editions. Poe was a subtle artist 
in the realm of the weird and the fantastic. In his intellect- 
ual nature there was a strange conjunction; an imagination 
as spiritual as Shelley's, though, unlike Shelley's, haunted 
perpetually with shapes of fear and the imagery of ruin; 
with this, an analytic power, a scientific exactness, and a 
mechanical ingenuity more usual in a chemist or a mathe- 
matician than in a poet. He studied carefully the mechanism 
of his verse and experimented endlessly with verbal and 
musical effects, such as repetition and monotone and the 
selection of Avords in which the consonants alliterated and 
the vowels varied. In his Philosophy of Composition he de- 
scribed how his best-known poem, the Haven, was system- 
atically built up on a preconceived plan in which the number 
of lines was first determined and the word " nevermore " 
selected as a starting-point. No one who knows the mood 
in which poetry is composed will believe that this ingenious 
piece of dissection really describes the way in which the 
Haven was conceived and written, or that any such delibei*- 
ate and self-conscious process could originate the associations 
from which a true poem S2:)rings. But it flattered Foe's 
l^ride of intellect to assert that his cooler reason had control 
not only over the execution of his poetry, but over the very 
well-head of thought and emotion. Some of his most suc- 
cessful stories, like the Gold Bug, the Mystery of Marie 
Roget, the Purloined Letter, and the Murders in the Rue 
Morgue, were applications of this analytic faculty to the 
solution of puzzles, such as the finding of buried treasure or 
of a lost document, or the ferreting out of a mysterious 
crime. After the publication of the Gold Bug he received 
from all parts of the country specimens of cipher-writing, 
which he delighted to work out. Others of his tales were 



164 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

clever pieces of mystification, like Ilaiis Pfaall, the story of 
a journey to the moon, or expei'iments at giving verisimili- 
tude to wild improbabilities by the skillful introduction of 
scientific details, as in the Facts in the Case of M. Valde- 
mar and Yon Kempelen''s Discovery. In his narratives of 
this kind Poe anticipated the detective novels of Gaboriau 
and AVilkie Collins, the scientific hoaxes of Jules Verne, and, 
though in a less degree, the artfully worked up likeness to 
fact in Edward Everett Hale's Man Without a Country, and 
similar fictions. While Dickens's Barnahy Rudye was pub- 
lishing in parts Poe showed his skill as a plot-hunter by 
publishing a paper in Grahani's Mayazine in which the 
very tangled intrigue of the novel was correctly raveled and 
\X\.Q finale predicted in advance. 

In his union of imagination and analytic j^ower Poe resem- 
bled Coleridge, who, if any one, was his teacher in poetry 
and criticism. Poe's verse often reminds one of Christabel 
and the Ancient Mariner, still oftener of Kuhla Khan. 
Like Coleridge, too, he indulged at times in the opium habit. 
But in Poe the artist predominated over every thing else. 
He began not with sentiment or thought, but with technique, 
with melody and color, tricks of language, and effects of 
verse. It is curious to study the growth of his style in his 
successive volumes of poetry. At first these are metrical 
experiments and vague images, original, and with a fascinat- 
ing suggestiveness, but with so little meaning that some of 
his earlier pieces are hardly removed from nonsense. Grad- 
ually, like distant music drawing nearer and nearer, his poe- 
try becomes fuller of imagination and of an inward signifi- 
cance, Avithout ever losing, however, its mysterious aloofness 
from the real world of the senses. It was a part of Poe's lit- 
erary creed — formed upon his own practice and his own lim- 
itations, but set forth with a great display of a priori rea- 
soning in his essay on the Poetic Principle and elsewhere — 
that pleasure and not instruction or moral exhortation was 



Literature in the Cities. 165 

the end of poetry; tliat beauty and not truth or goodness 
was its means ; and, furthermore, that the pleasure which it 
gave shouki be indefinite. About his own poetry there-was 
always this indefiniteness. His imagination dwelt in a 
strange country of dream — a " ghoul-haunted region of Weir," 
" out of space, out of time " — tilled with unsubstantial land- 
scapes and peopled by spectral shapes. And yet there is a 
wonderful, hidden significance in this uncanny scenery. 
The reader feels that the wild, fantasraal imagery is in itself 
a kind of language, and that it in some way expresses a 
brooding thought or passion, the terror and despair of a 
lost soul. Sometimes there is an obvious allegory, as in the 
Haunted Palace, which is the parable of a ruined mind, or in 
the Raven, the most popular of all Poe's poems, originally 
published in the American Whig Revieim for February, 1845. 
Sometimes the meaning is more obscure, as in Ulalnme, 
which, to most people, is quite incomprehensible, and yet 
to all readers of poetic feeling is among the most charac- 
teristic, and, therefore, the most fascinating, of its author's 
creations. 

Now and then, as in the beautiful ballad Annabel Lee, and 
To One in Paradise, the poet emerges into the light of com- 
mon human feeling and speaks a more intelligible language. 
But in general his poetry is not the poetry of the heart, and 
its passion is not the passion of flesh and blood. In Poe the 
thought of death is always near, and of the shadowy border- 
land between death and life. 

" The play is the tragedy ' Man,' 
And its hero tlie Conqueror Worm." 

The prose tale, Ligeia, in which these verses are inserted, 
is one of the most powerful of all Pfte's writings, and its 
theme is the power of the will to overcome death. In that 
singularly impressive poem. The lileeiyer, the morbid horror 
which invests the tomb springs from the same source, the 



166 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

materiality of Poe's imagination, which refuses to let the 
soul go free from the body. 

This quality explains why Poe's Tales of the Grotesque and 
Arabesque^ 1840, are on a lower plane than Hawthorne's 
romances, to which a few of them, like William Wilson and 
The Man of the Crowd, have some resemblance. The former 
of these, in particular, is in Hawthorne's peculiar province, 
the allegory of the conscience. But in general the tragedy 
in Hawthorne is a spiritual one, while Poe calls in the aid of 
material forces. The passion of physical fear or of supersti- 
tious horror is that which his writings most frequently excite. 
These tales represent various grades of the frightful and the 
ghastly, from the mere bugaboo story like the Black Cat, 
which makes children afraid to go in the dark, up to the 
breathless terror of the Cask of Amontillado, or the Red 
Death. Poe's masterpiece in this kind is the fateful tale of 
the Fall of the House of Usher, with its solemn and magnifi- 
cent close. His prose, at its best, often recalls, in its richl_y 
imaginative cast, the manner of De Quincey in such passages 
as his Dream Fiigue, or Our Ladies of Sorroio. In descrip- 
tive pieces like the Dotnain of Artiheini, and stories of ad- 
venture like the Descent into the Maelstrom, and his long 
sea-tale, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, 1838, he 
displayed a realistic inventiveness almost equal to Swift's or 
De Foe's. He was not without a mocking irony, but he had 
no constructive humor, and his attempts at the facetious were 
mostly failures. 

Poe's magical creations were rootless flowers. He took no 
hold upon the life about him, and cared nothing for the pub- 
lic concerns of his country. His poems and tales might have 
been written in vacuo for any thing American in them. 
Perhaps for this reason, in part, his fame has been so cosmo- 
politan. In France especially his writings have been favor- 
ites. Charles Baudelaire, the author of the Fleurs du Mai, 
translated them into French, and his own impressive but 



Literature in the Cities. 167 

unhealthy poetry shows evidence of Poe's influence. The 
defect in Poe was in character — a defect which will make 
itself felt in art as in life. If he had had the sweet home 
feeling of Longfellow or the moral fervor of Whittier he 
might have been a greater poet than either. 

"Ifl could dwell 
Where Israfel 

Hath dwelt, and he where I, 
He might not sing so wildly well 

A mortal melody, 
While a bolder note than this might swell 

From my lyre within the sky ! " 

Though Poe was a Southerner, if not by birth, at least by 
race and breeding, there was nothing distinctly Southern 
about his peculiar genius, and in his wandering life he was 
associated as much "with Philadelphia and New York as 
with Baltimore and Richmond. The conditions which had 
made the Southern colonies unfruitful in literary and educa- 
tional works before the Revolution continued to act down to 
the time of the civil war. Eli Whitney's invention of the cot- 
ton-gin in the closing years of the last century gave extension 
to slavery, making it profitable to cultivate the new staple by 
enormous gangs of field-hands working under the whip of 
the overseer in large plantations. Slavery became hence- 
forth a business speculation in the States furthest south, 
and not, as in Old Virginia and Kentucky, a comparatively 
mild domestic system. The necessity of defending its pecul- 
iar institution against the attacks of a growing faction in 
the North compelled the South to throw all its intellectual 
strength into politics, which, for that matter, is the natural 
occupation and excitement of a social aristocracy. Mean- 
while immigration sought the free States, and there was no 
middle class at the South. The " poor whites " were igno- 
rant and degraded. There were people of education in the 
cities and on some of the plantations, but there was no great 



168 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

educated class from M'hich a literature could proceed. And 
the culture of the South, such as it was, was becoming old- 
fashioned and local, as the section was isolated more and 
more from the rest of the Union and from the enlightened 
public opinion of Europe by its reactionary prejudices and 
its sensitiveness on the subject of slavery. Nothing can be 
imagined more ridiculously provincial than the sophomorical 
editorials in the Southern press just before the outbreak of 
the war, or than the backward and ill-informed articles which 
passed for reviews in the poorly supported periodicals of the 
South. 

In the general dearth of work of high and permanent value, 
one or two Southern authors may be mentioned whose writ- 
ings have at least done something to illustrate the life and 
scenery of their section. When in 1833 the Baltimore Satur- 
day Visitor offered a prize of a hundred dollars for the best 
prose tale, one of the committee who awarded the prize to 
Poe's first story, the MS. Found in a Bottle, was John P. 
Kennedy, a Whig gentleman of Baltimore, who afterward 
became secretary of the navy in Fillmore's administration. 
The year before he had published Swalloio Barn, a series of 
agreeable sketches of country life in Virginia. In 1835 and 
1838 he published his two novels. Horse- Shoe Robinson and 
Boh of the Bowl, the former a story of the Revolutionary 
War in South Carolina, the latter an historical tale of colo- 
nial Maryland. These had sufficient success to warrant re- 
printing as late as 1852. But the most popular and volumi- 
nous of all Southern writers of fiction was William Gilmore 
Simms, a South Carolinian, who died in 1870. He wrote 
over thirty novels, mostly romances of Revolutionary history. 
Southern life, and wild adventure, among the best of which 
were the Partisati, 1835, and the Yemassee. Simms was an 
inferior Cooper, with a difierence. His novels are good boys' 
books, but are crude and hasty in composition. He was 
strongly Southern in his symjjathies, though his newspaper. 



Literature in the Cities. 169 

the GharleBton City Gazette, took part against the Nullifiers. 
His miscellaneous writings include several histories and biog- 
raphies, political tracts, addresses, and critical papers con- 
tributed to Southern magazines. He also wrote numerous 
poems, the most ambitious of which was Atlantis, a /Story of 
the Sea, 1832. His poems have little value except as here 
and there illustrating local scenery and manners, as in Sout/i- 
ern Passages and Pictures, 1839. Mr. John Esten Cooke's 
pleasant but not very strong Virginia Comedians was, per- 
haps, in literary quality the best Southern novel produced 
before the civil war. 

When Poe came to New York the most conspicuous liter- 
ary figure of the metroijolis, with the possible exception of 
Bryant and Halleck, was N. P. Willis, one of the editors of 
the Evening Mirror, upon which journal Poe was for a time 
engaged. Willis had made a literary reputation, when a 
student at Yale, by his Scripture Poems, written in smooth 
blank verse. Afterward he had edited the American Monthly 
in his native city of Boston, and more recently he had pul)- 
lished Pencillings by the Way, 1835, a pleasant record of 
European saunterings; Inklings of Adoetitnre, 1836, a col- 
lection of dashing stories and sketches of American and 
foreign life; and Letters from Under a Bridge, 1839, a series 
of charming rural letters from his country place at Owego, 
on the Susquehanna. Willis's work, always graceful and 
sparkling, sometimes even brilliant, though light in substance 
and jaunty in style, had quickly raised him to the summit of 
popularity. During the years from 1835 to 1850 he was the 
most successful American magazinist, and even down to the 
day of his death, in 1807, he retained his hold upon the atten- 
tion of the fashionable public by his easy paragraphing and cor- 
respondence in the Mirror and its successor, the Home Jour- 
nal, which catered to the literary wants of the heau nionde. 
Much of Willis's work was ephemeral, though clever of its 
kind, but a few of his best tales and sketches, such as 



170 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

F. Smith, The Ghost Ball at Congress Hall, Edith Linsey, and 
the Lunatic's Skate, together with some of the Letters from 
Under a Bridge, are worthy of preservation, not only as 
readable stories, but as society studies of life at American 
watering-places like Nahant and Saratoga and Ballston Spa 
half a century ago. A number of his simpler poems, like 
Unseen Spirits, Sjyriug, To M — from Abroad, and Lines on 
Leaving Europe, still retain a deserved place in collections 
and anthologies. 

The senior editor of the Mirror, George P. Morris, was 
once a very pojjular song-writer, and his Woodman, Spare 
that Tree, still survives. Other residents of New York city 
who have written single famous pieces w^ere Clement C. 
Moore, a 2:)rofessor in the General Theological Seminary, 
whose Visit from St. Nicholas — " 'Twas the Night Before 
Christmas," etc. — is a favorite ballad in every nursery in the 
land; Charles Fenno Hoffman, a novelist of reputation in his 
time, but now remembered only as the author of the song 
SparJding and Bright, and tlie i:)atriotic ballad of Monterey ; 
Robert H. Messinger, a native of Boston, but long resident 
in New York, where he was a familiar figure in fashionable 
society, who wrote Give Me the Old, a fine ode with a 
choice Horatian flavor; and William Allen Butler, a lawyer 
and occasional writer, whose capital satire of Nothing to Wear 
was published anonymously and had a great run. Of younger 
poets, like Stoddard and Aldrich, who formerly wrote for 
the Mirror and who are still living and working in the ma- 
turity of their powers, it is not within the limits and design 
of this sketch to speak. But one of their contemporaries. 
Bayard Taylor, who died American minister at Berlin, in 
1878, though a Pennsylvanian by birth and rearing, may be 
reckoned among the " literati of New York." A farmer lad 
from Chester County, who had learned the printer's trade 
and printed a little volume of his juvenile verses in 1844, he 
came to New York shortly after Avith credentials from Dr. 



Literature in the Cities. 171 

Griswold, the editor of GrahanCs, and obtaining encourage- 
ment and aid from Willis, Horace Greeley, and others, he set 
out to make the tour of Europe, walking from town to town 
in Germany and getting employment now and then at his 
trade to help pay the expenses of the trip. The story of 
these Wanderjahre he told in his Views Afoot, 1846. This 
was the first of eleven books of travel written during the 
course of his life. He was an inveterate nomad, and his 
journeyings carried him to the remotest regions — to Califor- 
nia, India, China, Japan, and the isles of the sea, to Central 
Africa and the Soudan, Palestine, Egypt, Iceland, and the 
" by-ways of Europe." His head-quarters at home were in 
New York, where he did literary work for the Tribune. He 
was a rapid and incessant woi'ker, throwing off many volumes 
of verse and prose, fiction, essays, sketches, translations, and 
criticisms, mainly contributed in the first instance to the 
magazines. His vei-satility was very marked, and his poetry 
ranged from Rhymes of Travel, 1848, and Poems of the 
Orient, 1854, to idyls and home ballads of Pennsylvania 
life, like the Quaker Widov; and the Old Pennsylvania 
Farmer / and on the other side, to ambitious and somewhat 
mystical poems, like the Masque of the Gods^ 1872 — 
written in four days — and dramatic experiments like the 
Prophet, 1874, and Prince Deukalion, 1878. He was a 
man of buoyant and enger nature, with a great appe- 
tite for new experience, a remarkable memory, a talent 
for learning languages, and a too great readiness to take 
the hue of his favorite books. From his facility, his 
openness to external impressions of scenery and cos- 
tume and his habit of turning these at once into the 
service of his pen, it results that there is something 
" newspapery " and superficial about most of his prose. 
It is reporter's work, though reporting of a high order. 
His poetry too, though full of glow and picturesque- 
ness, is largely imitative, suggesting Tennyson not unfre- 



172 INITIAL Studies ix American Letters. 

quently, but more often Shelley. His spirited Bedouin 
So7ig, for example, has an echo of Shelley's Lines to an 
Indian Air: 

" From the desert I come to thee 

On a stallion shod with tire ; 
And the winds are left behind 

In the speed of my desire. 
Under thy window I stand, 

And the midnight hears my cry ; 
I love thee, I love but thee, 

With a love that shall not die." 

The dangerous quickness with which he caught the manner 
of other j^oets made him an admirable parodist and transla- 
tor. His Echo Club, 1876, contains some of the best traves- 
ties in the tongue, and his great translation of Goethe's 
Faust, 1870-71 — with its wonderfully close reproduction of 
tlie original meters — is one of the glories of American liter- 
ature. All in all, Taylor may unhesitatingly be put first 
among our poets of the second generation — the generation 
succeeding that of Longfellow and Lowell — although the 
lack in him of original genius self-determined to a peculiar 
sphere, or the want of an inward fixity and concentration to 
resist the rich tumult of outward impressions, has made him 
less significant in the history of our literary thought than 
some other writers less generously endoAved. 

Taylor's novels had the qualities of his verse. They were 
profuse, eloquent, and faulty. John Godfrey'' s Fortune, 
1864, gave a picture of bohemian life in New York. Han- 
nah IVmrston, 1863, and the Story of Kennett, 1866, intro- 
duced many incidents and persons from the old Quaker life 
of rural Pennsylvania, . as Taylor remembered it in his boy- 
hood. The former was like Hawthorne's Blithedale Ro- 
mance, a satire on fanatics and reformers, and its heroine is 
a nobly conceived character, though drawn with some exag- 
geration. The Story of Kennett, which is largely autobio- 



Literature in the Cities. 1'73 

graphic, has a greater freshness and reality than the others, 
and is full of personal recollections. In these novels, as iu 
his short stories, Taylor's pictorial skill is greater on the 
whole than his jDower of creating characters or inventing 
plots. 

Literature in the West now began to have an existence. 
Another young poet from Chester County, Pa., namely, 
Thomas Buchanan Read, Avent to Cincinnati, and not to New 
York, to study sculpture and painting, about 1837, and one 
of his best-known poems, Pons 3faxlmus, was written on the 
occasion of the opening of the suspension bridge across the 
Ohio. Read came East, to be sure, in 1841, and spent many 
years in our sea-board cities and in Italy. He was distinctly 
a minor poet, but some of his Pennsylvania pastorals, like 
the Deserted Moad, have a natural sweetness; and his luxu- 
rious Drifting, which combines the methods of painting and 
jroetry, is justly popular. Sheridan^s Hide — perhaps his 
most current piece — is a rather forced production, and has 
been overpraised. The two Ohio sister jioets, Alice and 
Phcebe Cary, were attracted to New York in 1850, as soon 
as their literary success seemed assured. They made that 
city their home for the remainder of their lives. Poe 
praised Alice Cary's Pictures of Memory, and Phoebe's 
Nearer Home has become a favorite hymn. There is noth- 
ing peculiarly Western about the verse of the Cary sisters. 
It is the poetry of sentiment, memory, and domestic affec- 
tion, entirely feminine, rather tame and diffuse as a whole, 
but tender and sweet, cherished by many good women and 
dear to simple hearts. 

A stronger smack of the soil is in the Negro melodies like 
Uncle JVed, Susanna, Old Folks at Home, ' Way Down 
South, Nelly vms a Lady, My Old Kentuchy Home, etc., 
which were the work, not of any Southern poet, but of Ste- 
phen C. Foster, a native of Allegheny, Pa., and a resident 
of Cincinnati and Pittsbui-g. He composed the words and 



174 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

music of these, and many others of a similar kind, dnring 
the years 184*7 to 1861. Taken together they form the most 
original and vital addition which this country has made to 
the psalmody of the world, and entitle Foster to the first 
rank among American song-writers. 

As Foster's plaintive melodies carried the pathos and hu- 
mor of the plantation all over the land, so Mrs. Harriet 
Beecher Stowe's Uncle Toni's Cabin, 1852, brought home to 
millions of readers the sufferings of the Negroes in the 
" black belt " of the cotton-growing States. This is the 
most popular novel ever written in America. Hundreds of 
thousantis of copies were sold in this country and in En- 
gland, and some forty translations were made into foreign 
tongues. In its dramatized form it still keeps the stage, and 
the statistics of cii'culating libraries show that even now it 
is in greater demand than any other single book. It did 
more than any other literary agency to rouse the public con- 
science to a sense of the shame and horror of slavery ; more 
even than Garrison's Liberator; more than the indignant 
poems of Whittier and Lowell or the orations of Sumner 
and Phillips. It presented the thing concretely and dramat- 
ically, and in particular it made the odious Fugitive Slave 
Law forever impossible to enforce. It Avas useless for the 
defenders of slavery to protest that the picture was exag- 
gerated, and that planters like Legree were the exception. 
The system under which such brutalities could happen, and 
did sometimes happen, was doomed. It is easy now to point 
out defects of taste and art in this masterpiece, to show that 
the tone is occasionally melodramatic, that some of the char- 
acters are conventional, and that the literary execution is 
in parts feeble and in others coarse. In spite of all, it re- 
mains true that Uncle Toni's Cabin is a great book, the work 
of genius seizing instinctively upon its opportunity and ut- 
tering the thought of the time with a power that thrilled the 
heart of the nation and of the world. Mrs. Stowe never 



Literature in the Cities. 175 

repeated her first success. Some of her novels of New En- 
gland life, such as the 3Iinister^s Wooing, 1859, and the 
Pearl of Orr''s Island, 1862, have a mild kind of interest, 
and contain truthful portraiture of provincial ways and 
traits; while later fictions of a domestic type, like Pink and 
White Tyranny and My Wife and I, are really beneath 
criticism. 

There were other Connecticut writers contemporary with 
Mrs. Stowe: Mrs. L. II. Sigourney, for example, a Hartford 
poetess, formerly known as " the Hemans of America," but 
now quite obsolete; and J. G. Percival, of New Haven, a 
shy and eccentric scholar, whose geological work was of 
value, and whose memory is preserved by one or two of his 
simpler poems, still in circulation, such as To Seneca Lake 
and the Coral Grove. Another Hartford poet, Brainard — 
already spoken of as an early friend of Whittier — died 
young, leaving a few pieces which show that his lyrical gift 
was spontaneous and genuine, but had received little culti- 
vation. A much younger writer than either of these, Donald 
G. Mitchell, of New Haven, has a more lasting place in our 
literature, by virtue of his charmingly written Reveries of a 
Bachelor, 1850, and Dream Life, 1852, stories which sketch 
themselves out in a series of reminiscences and lightly con- 
nected scenes, and which always appeal freshly to young men 
because they have that dreamy outlook upon life which is 
characteristic of youth. But, upon the whole, the most im- 
portant contribution made by Connecticut in that generation 
to the literary stock of America was the Beecher family. 
Lyman Beecher had been an influential preacher and theolo- 
gian, and a sturdy defender of orthodoxy against Boston 
Unitarianisra. Of his numerous sons and daughters, all more 
or less noted for intellectual vigor and independence, the 
most eminent were Mrs. Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher, the 
great pulpit orator of Brooklyn. Mr. Beecher was too busy 
a man to give more than his spare moments to general liter- 



176 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

ature. His sermons, lectures, and addresses were reported 
for the daily papers and printed in part in book form; but 
these lose greatly when divorced from the large, warm, and 
benignant personality of the man. His volumes made up of 
articles in the Independent and the Ledger, such as Star Pa- 
pers, 1855, and £Ji/es and Ears, 1862, contain many delight- 
ful morceaiix upon country life and similar topics, thougli 
they are hardly wrought with sufficient closeness and care 
to take a permanent place in letters. Like Willis's Epheni- 
eroi, they are excellent literary journalism, but hardly 
literature. 

We may close our retrospect of American literature before 
I 1861 with a brief notice of one of the most striking literary 
phenomena of the time — the Leaves of Grass of Walt 
Whitman, published at Brooklyn in 1855. The author, born 
at West Hills, Long Island, in 1819, had been printer, school- 
teacher, editor, and builder. He had scribbled a good deal 
of poetry of the ordinary kind, which attracted little atten- 
tion, but finding conventional rhymes and meters too cramp- 
ing a vehicle for his need of expression, he discarded them 
for a kind of rhythmic chant, of which the following is a 
fair specimen : 

"Press close, bare-bosom'd night I Press close, magnetic, nourishing 

night ! 
Night of south winds! night of the few large starsl 
Still, nodding night I mad, naked, summer mghtl " 

The invention was not altogether a new one. The English 
translation of the psalms of David and of some of the 
prophets, the Poems of Ossian, and some of Matthew 
Arnold's unrhymed pieces, especially the Strayed Reveller, 
have an irregular rhythm of this kind, to say nothing of the 
old Anglo-Saxon poems, like Beowulf and the Scripture par- 
aphrases attributed to Caedraon. But this species of oratio 
sohita, carried to the lengths to which Whitman carried it. 



Literature im the Cities. 17*? 

had an air of novelty which was displeasing to some, while 
to others, weary of familiar measures and jingling rhymes, 
it was refreshing in its boldness and freedom. There is no 
consenting estimate of this poet. Many think that his so- 
called poems are not poems at all, but simply a bad variety 
of prose; that there is nothing to him beyond a combination 
of affectation and indecency; and that the Whitman cidte is 
a passing "fad " of a few literary men, and especially of a 
number of English critics like Rossetti, Swinburne, Bu- 
chanan, etc., who, being determined to have something un- 
mistakably American — that is, different from any thing else 
— in writings from this side of the water, before they Avill 
acknowledge any originality in them, have been misled into 
discovering in Whitman " the poet of democracy." Others 
maintain that he is the greatest of American poets, or, in- 
deed, of all modern poets; that he is "cosmic," or universal, 
and that he has put an end forever to puling rhymes and 
lines chopped up into metrical feet. Whether Whitman's 
poetry is fornially poetry at all or merely the raw material 
of poetry, the chaotic and amorphous impression which it 
makes on readers of conservative tastes results from his ef- 
fort to take up into his verse elements which poetry has 
usually left out — the ugly, the earthy, and even the disgust- 
ing; the " under side of things," which he holds not to be 
prosaic when apprehended with a strong, masculine joy in 
life and nature seen in all their aspects. The lack of these 
elements in the conventional poets seems to him and his dis- 
ciples like leaving out the salt from the ocean, making jjoetry 
merely pretty and blinking whole classes of facts. Hence 
the naturalism and animalism of some of the divisions in 
Leaves of Grass, particularly that entitled Children of Adatn, 
which gave great offense by its immodest}^, or its outspoken- 
ness. Whitman holds that nakedness is chaste; that all the 
functions of the body in healthy exercise are equally clean; 
that all, in fact, are divine, and that matter is as divine as 
13 



178 Initial Studies in Amkrican Letters. 

spirit. The effort to get every thing into his poetry, to 
speak out his thought just as it comes to him, accounts, too, 
for his way of cataloguing objects without selection. His 
single expressions are often unsurpassed for descriptive beauty 
and truth. He speaks of " the vitreous pour of the full 
moon, just tinged Avith blue," of the "lisp" of the plane, of 
tlie prairies, "where herds of buffalo make a crawling spread 
of the square miles." But if there is any eternal distinction 
between poetry and prose, the most liberal canons of the 
poetic art will never agree to accept lines like these: 

" And [I] remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles ; 
He stayed with me a week before he was recuperated, and passed north." 

Whitman is the spokesman of democracy and of the future; 
full of brotlierliness and hope, loving the warm, gregarious 
pressui'e of the crowd and the touch of his comrade's elbow 
in the ranks. He liked the iJeople — multitudes of people ; 
the swarm of life beheld from a Broadway omnibus or a 
Brooklyn ferry-boat. The rowdy and the Xegro truck- 
driver were closer to his sympathy than the gentleman and 
the scholar. "I loaf and invite my soul," he writes; "I 
sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world." His 
poem Walt Whitman, frankly egotistic, simply describes 
himself as a typical, average man — the same as any other 
man, and therefore not individual but universal. He has 
great tenderness and heartiness — "the good gray poet; " and 
during the civil war he devoted himself unreservedly to the 
wounded soldiers in the Washington hosj^itals — an experience 
which he has related in the Dresser and elsewhere. It is 
characteristic of his rough and ready comradery to use slang 
and newspaper English in his poetry, to call himself Walt 
instead of Walter, and to have his picture taken in a slouch 
hat and with a flannel shirt open at the throat. His de- 
criers allege that he poses for effect; that he is simply a back- 
ward eddy in the tide, and significant only as a temporary 



Literature in the Cities. 179 

reaction against ultra civilization — like Thoreau, though in a 
different way. But with all his shortcomings in art there is a 
healthy, virile, tumultuous pulse of life in his lyric utterance 
and a great sweep of imagination in his panoramic view of 
times and countries. One likes to read him because he feels 
so good, enjoys so fully the play of his senses, and has such 
a lusty confidence in his own immortality and in the pros- 
pects of the human race. Stripped of verbiage and repeti- 
tion, his ideas are not many. His indebtedness to Emerson 
— who Avrote an introduction to the Leaves of Grass — is mani- 
fest. He sings of man and not men, and the individual dif- 
ferences of character, sentiment, and passion, the dramatic 
elements of life, find small place in his system. It is too 
early to say what will be his final position in literary his- 
tory. But it is noteworthy that the democratic masses have 
not accepted him yet as their poet. Whittier and Long- 
fellow, the poets of conscience and feeling, are the darlings 
of the American people. The admiration, and even the 
knowledge of Whitman, are mostly esoteric, confined to the 
literary class. It is also not without significance as to the 
ultimate reception of his innovations in verse that he has 
numerous parodists, but no imitators. The tendency among 
our younger poets is not toward the abandonment of rhyme 
and meter, but toward the introduction of new stanza forms 
and an increasing carefulness and finish in the technique of 
their art. It is observable, too, that in his most inspired 
])assages Whitman reverts to the old forms of verse; to blank 
verse, for example, in the Man-of- War- Bird: 

" Thou who hast slept all night upon tlie storm, 
Waking renewed on thy prodigious pinions," etc. ; ' 

and elsewhere not infrequently to dactylic hexameters and 
pentameters : 

'• Earth of shine and dark, mottling the tide of the river! . . . 
Far-swooping, elbowed earth 1 rich, apple-blossomed earth." 



180 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

Indeed, Whitman's most jjopular poem, My Captain, writ- 
ten after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, differs little 
in form from ordinary verse, as a stanza of it will show: 

" My captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still ; 
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will ; 
The ship is anchored safe and sound, iLs voyage clesed and done; 
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won. 
Exult, shores, and ring, bells I 

But I, with mournful tread. 
Walk the deck, my captain lies 
Fallen, cold and dead." 

This is from Drum Taps, a volume of poems of the civil 
war. Whitman has also Avritten prose having much the 
same quality as his poetry: Demon'atle Vistas, Me)iiorancla 
of the Civil War, and, more recently, Specimen Days. His 
residence of late years has been at Camden, New Jersey, 
where a centennial edition of his writings was published in 
1876. 



1. William Cullen Bryant, llianatopsis. To a Water- 
fowl. Green River. Hymn to the North Star. A I'hrest 
Hymn. " Fairest of the Mural Maids.''^ June. The 
Death of the Flowers. TJie Evening Wind. Tlie Battle- 
Field. The Planting of the Ap^yle-tree. The Flood of 

Years. 

2. John Greenleaf Whittier. Cassandra Southwick. The 
New Wife and the Old. The Virgirda Slave Mother. Ran- 
dolph of Roanoke. Barclay of TIry. The Witch of Wen- 
ham. Skipper Ireson''s Ride. Marguerite. Maud Midler. 
Telling the Bees. My Playmate. Barbara Frietchie. Icha- 
hod. Baus Deo. Snotv-Bound. 

3. Edgar Allan Poe. The Raven. The Bells. Israfel. 
Ulcd^ime. To Helen. The City hi the Sea. Annabel Lee. 
To One in Paradise. The Sleeper. The Valley of Unrest. 



Literature in the Cities. 181 

The Fall of the House of Usher. Ligeia. 'William Wilson. 
The Cask of Arnoniillado. The Assignation. The Masque 
of the Red Death. Narrative of A. Gordon Pym. 

4. N. P. Willis. Select Prose Writings. New York: 
Charles Scribner's Sons. 1886. 

5. Mrs. H. B. Stowe. Uncle Totn's Cahin. Oldtown Folks. 

6. W. G. Simras. The Partisan. The Yemassee. 

1. Bayard Taylor. A Bacchic Ode. Hylas. Kuhleh. 
The Soldier and the Pard. Sicilian Wine. Taurus. Sera- 
pion. The Metempsychosis of. the Pine. The Temptation 
of Hassan Ben Klialed. Bedouin Song. Euphorion. The 
Quaker Widoic. John Reid. Lars. Views Afoot. By- 
ways of Europe. The Story of Kennett. The Echo Cluh. 

8. Walt Whitman, Ily Captain. " When Lilacs Last 
in the Boor-yard Bloomed.''^ " Out of the Cradle Endlessly 
Rocking.'''' Pioneers, Pioneers. The Mystic Trumpeter, 
A Woman at Auction. Sea-shore Memoirs. Passage to 
India. Mannahatta. The Wound Dresser. Longings for 
Home. 

9. Poets of America. By E. C, Stedman. Boston: 
Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1885. 



182 Initial Studies in American Letters. 



CHAPTER VII. 

LITERATURE SINCE 1861. 

A generation has nearly passed since the outbreak of the 
civil war, and although public affairs are still mainly in the 
hands of men who had reached manhood before the conflict 
opened, or who were old enough at that time to remember 
clearly its stirring events, the younger men who are daily com- 
ing forward to take their places know it only by tradition. 
It makes a definite break in the history of our literature, and a 
number of new literary schools and tendencies have appeared 
since its close. As to the literature of the war itself, it was 
largely the work of writers who had already reached or passed 
middle age. All of the more important authors described in 
the last three chapters survived the Rebellion except Poe, 
who died in 1849, Prescott, who died in 1859, and Tiioreau 
and Hawthorne, Avho died in the second and fourth years of 
the war, respectively. The final and authoritative history 
of the struggle has not yet been written, and cannot be writ- 
ten for many years to come. Many partial and tentative 
accounts have, however, appeared, among which may be 
mentioned, on the Northern side, Horace Greeley's Americmi 
Conflict, 1864-66; Vice-President Wilson's Bise and Fall of 
the Slave Povier in America, and J. W. Draper's American 
Civil War, 1868-70; on the Southern side Alexander H. 
Stephens's Confederate States of America, Jefferson Davis's 
Mise and Fall of the Confederate States of America, and E. 
A. Pollard's Lost Cause. These, with the exception of Dr. 
Draper's philosophical narrative, have the advantage of be- 
ing the work of actors in the political or military events 
which they describe, and the disadvantage of being, there- 



Literature Sintce 1861. 183 

fore, partisan — in some instances passionately partisan. A 
store-house of materials for the coming historian is also at 
hand in Frank Moore's great collection, the Rebellion Rec- 
ord ; in numerous regimental histories of special armies, 
departments, and battles, like W. Swinton's Army of the 
Potomac^ in the autobiographies and recollections of Grant 
and Sherman and other military leaders; in the "war 
papers," lately published in the Century magazine, and in 
innumerable sketches and reminiscences by officers and pri- 
vates on both sides. 

The war had its poetry, its humors, and its general litera- 
ture, some of which have been mentioned in connection with 
Whittitr, Lowell, Holmes, Whitman, and others, and some 
of which remain to be mentioned, as the work of new writ- 
ers, or of writers who had previously made little mark. 
There were war-songs on both sides, few of which had much 
literary value excepting, perhaps, James R. Randall's South- 
ern ballad, Maryland, My Maryland, sung to the old col- 
lege air of Lauric/er Horatius^ and the grand martial chorus 
of John Br 01071' s Body, an old Methodist hymn, to wdiich 
the Northern armies beat time as they went " marching on." 
Randall's song, though spirited, was maiTed by its fire-eating 
absurdities about " vandals " and " minions " and " Northern 
scum," the cheap insults of the Southern newspaper press. 
To furnish the John Brown chorus with words worthy of 
the music, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe wrote her Battle- Hymn 
of the Reiyuhllc, a noble poem, but rather too fine and liter- 
ary for a song, and so never fully accepted by the soldiers. 
Among the many verses which voiced the anguish and the 
patriotism of that stern time, which told of partings and 
home-comings, of women waiting by desolate hearths, in 
country homes, for tidings of husbands and sons who had 
gone to the war; or which celebrated individual deeds of 
heroism or sang the thousand private tragedies and heart- 
breaks of the great conflict, by far the greater number were 



184 Initial Studies in American Letters, 

of too humble a grade to survive the feeling of the hour. 
Among the best or the most popular of them were Kate 
Putnam Osgood's Driving Home the Cows, Mrs. Ethel Lynn 
Beers's All Quiet Along the Potomac, Foreeythe Willson's 
Old Sergeant, and John James Piatt's Riding to Vote. Of 
the poets whom the war brought out, or developed, the most 
noteworthy were Henry Tirarod, of South Carolina, and 
Henry Howard Brownell, of Connecticut. During the war 
Timrod was with the Confederate Army of the West, as cor- 
respondent for the Charleston Mercury, and in 1864 he be- 
came assistant editor of the South Carolinian, at Columbia. 
Sherman's " march to the sea " broke up his business, and 
he returned to Charleston. A complete edition of his poems 
was published in 1873, six years after his death. The pret- 
tiest of all Timrod's poems is Katie, but more to our present 
purpose are CJiarleston — written in the time of blockade — 
and the Unknown Dead, which tells 

" Of nameless graves on battle plains, 
Wash'd by a single winter's rains, 
Where, some beneath Virginian hills, 
And some by green Atlantic rills. 
Some by the waters of the "West, 
A myriad unknown heroes rest." 

When the war was over a poet of New York State, F. M. 
Finch, sang of these and of other graves in his beautiful Dec- 
oration Day lyric. The Blue and the Gray, which spoke the 
word of reconciliation and consecration for North and South 
alike. 

Brownell, whose Lyrics of a Day and War Lyrics were 
published respectively in 1864 and 1866, was private secre- 
tary to Farragut, on whose flag-ship, the Hartford, he was 
present at several great naval engagements, such as the 
" Passage of the Forts " below New Orleans, and the action 
off Mobile, described in his poem, the Bay Fight. With 
some roughness and unevenness of execution Brownell's 



LiTEEATURE SiNCE 1861, 185 

poetry had a tire which places him next to Whittier as the 
Korner of the civil war. In him, especially, as in Whittier, 
is that Puritan sense of the righteousness of his cause which 
made the battle for the Union a holy war to the crusaders 
against slavery: 

" Full red the furnace fires must glow 

That melt the ore of mortal kind: 
The mills of God are grinding slow, 

But ah, how close they grind I 

" To-day the Dahlgren and the drum 

Are dread apostles of his name; 
His kingdom here can only come 

By chrism of blood and flame." 

One of the earliest martyrs of the war was Theodore Win- 
throp, hardly known as a writer until the publication in the 
Atlantic Monthly of his vivid sketches of Washington as a 
Gamp, describing the march of his regiment, the famous 
New York Seventh, and its first quarters in the Capitol at 
Washington. A tragic interest was given to these papers 
by Winthrop's gallant death in the action of Big Bethel, 
June 10, 1801. While this was still fresh in public recollection 
his manuscript novels were published, together with a collec- 
tion of his stories and sketches reprinted from the magazines. 
His novels, though in parts crude and immature, have a dash 
and buoyancy — an out-door air about them — which give the 
reader a winning impression of Winthrop's personality. 
The best of them is, perhaps, Cecil Dreeme, a romance that 
reminds one a little of Hawthorne, and the scene of which is 
the New York University building on Washington Square, 
a locality that has been further celebrated in Henry James's 
novel of Washington Square. 

Another member of this same Seventh Regiment, Fitz 
James O'Brien, an Irishman by birth, who died at Baltimore 
in 1802 from the effects of a wound received in a cavalry 



186 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

skirmish, had contributed to tlie magazines a number of 
poems and ot" brilliant though fantastic tales, among which 
the Diamond Lens and What Was It? had something of 
Edgar A. Poe's quality. Another Irish-American, Charles 
G, Ilalpine, under the pen-name of "Miles O'Reilly," wrote 
a good many clever ballads of the war, partly serious ami 
partly in comic brogue. Prose writers of note furnished the 
magazines with narratives of their experience at the seat of 
war, among papers of which kind may be mentioned Dr. 
Plolmes's J/y Search for theCaptain, in the Atlantic Monthly, 
and Colonel T. W. Iligginson's Army Life in a Black Regi- 
ment, collected into a volume in 1870. 

Of the public oratory of the war, the foremost example is 
the ever-memorable address of Abraham Lincoln at the ded- 
ication of the National Cemetery at Gettysburg. The war 
had brought the nation to its intellectual majority. In the 
stress of that terrible fight there was no room for buncombe 
and verbiage, such as the newspapers and stump-speakers 
used to dole out in ante hellion days. Lincoln's speech is 
short — a few grave words which he turned aside for a mo- 
ment to speak in the midst of his task of saving the country. 
The speech is simple, naked of figures, every sentence im- 
pi'essed with a sense of responsibility for the work yet to be 
done and with a stern determination to do it, " In a larger 
sense," it says, " we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, 
we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and 
dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far above our 
poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor 
long remember what we say here, but it can never forget 
what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather to be ded- 
icated here to the unfinished work which they who fought 
hei*e have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to 
be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us; that 
from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that 
cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; 



Literature Since 1861. 187 

that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have 
died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new 
birth of freedom; and that government of the peo})le, by the 
people, for the people, shall not perish from the eartli." 
Here was eloquence of a different sort from the sonorous per- 
orations of Webster or the polished climaxes of Everett. As 
we read the plain, strong language of this brief classic, with its 
solemnity, its restraint, its " brave old wisdom of sincerity," 
we seem to see the president's homely features irradiated 
with the light of coming martyrdom — 

"The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man, 

Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame, 
New birth of our new soil, the first American." 

Within the past quarter of a century the popular school of 
American humor has reached its culmination. Every man 
of genius who is a humorist at all is so in a way peculiar to 
himself. There is no lack of indi'viduality in the humor of 
Irving and Hawthorne and the wit of Holmes and Lowell, but 
although they are new in subject and ajiplication they are 
not new in kind. Lwing, as we have seen, was the literary 
descendant of Addison. The character-sketches in Jirace- 
hridye Hall are of the same family with Sir Roger de Cover- 
ley and the other figures of the Spectator Club. Knicker- 
bocker's History of New York, though purely American in 
its matter, is not distinctly American in its method, which is 
akin to the mock heroic of Fielding and the irony of Swift in 
the Voyage to Lilliput. Irving's humor, like that of all the 
great English humorists, had its root in the perception of 
character — of the characteristic traits of men and classes of 
men, as ground of amusement. It depended for its eiFect, 
therefore, upon its truthfulness, its dramatic insight and 
sympathy, as did the humor of Shakespeare, of Sterne, Lamb, 
and Thackeray. This perception of the characteristic, when 
pushed to excess, issues in grotesque and caricature, as in 



188 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

some of Dickens's inferior creations, winch are little more 
than personified single tricks of manner, speech, feature, or 
dress. Hawthorne's rare humor diifered from Irvine's in 
temper but not in substance, and belonged, like Irving's, to 
the English variety. Dr. Holmes's more pronouncedly comic 
verse does not differ specifically from the facetiae of Thomas 
Hood, but his prominent trait is wit, which is the laughter 
of the head as humor is of the heart. The same is true, with 
qualifications, of Lowell, whose JBlglow Papers^ though hu- 
mor of an original sort in their revelation of Yankee charac- 
ter, are essentially satirical. It is the cleverness, the shrewd- 
ness of the hits in the Bigloio Papers, their logical, that is, 
witty character, as distinguished from their drollery, that ar- 
rests the attention. They are funny, but they are not so 
funny as they are smart. In all these writers humor was 
blent with more serious qualities, which gave fineness and 
literary value to their humorous writings. Their view of 
life was not exclusively comic. But there has been a class of 
jesters, of i^rofessional humorists, in America, whose product 
is so indigenous, so different, if not in essence, yet at least in 
form and expression, from any European humor, that it may 
be regarded as a unique addition to the comic literature of 
the world. It has been accepted as such in England, where 
Artemus Ward and Mark Twain are familiar to multitudes 
who have never read the One Hoss-Shay or The Courtin''. 
And though it would be ridiculous to maintain that either of 
these writers takes rank with Lowell and Holmes, or to deny 
that there is an amount of flatness and coarseness in many of 
their labored fooleries which puts large portions of their 
writings below the line where real literature begins, still it 
will not do to ignore them as mere buffoons, or even to pre- 
dict that their humors will soon be forgotten. It is true that 
no literary fashion is more subject to change than the fashion 
of a jest, and that jokes that make one generation laugh seem 
insipid to the next. But there is something perennial in the 



Literature Since 1861. 189 

fun of Rabelais, whom Bacon called "the great jester of 
France; " and though the puns of Shakespeare's clowns are 
detestable the clowns themselves have not lost their power 
to amuse. 

The Americans are not a gay peoj^le, but they are fond of 
a joke. Lincoln's "little stoi'ies " were characteristically 
Western, and it is doubtful whether he was more endeared to 
the masses by his solid virtues than by the humorous percep- 
tion which made him one of them. The humor of which Ave 
are speaking now is a strictly popular and national posses- 
sion. Though America has never, or not until lately, had a 
comic paper ranking with Punch or Charivari or the FUeg- 
ende Blatter, every newspaper has had its funny column. 
Our humorists have been graduated from the journalist's desk 
and sometimes from the printing-press, and now and then a 
local or country newspaper has risen into sudden prosperity 
from the possession of a new humorist, as in the case of 
G. D. Prentice's Courier- Jotimal, or more recently of the 
Cleveland Plaindealer, the Panhury JVews, the Burlington 
Hawkey e, the Arkansain Traveller, the Texas Sif tings, and 
numerous others. Nowadays there are even syndicates of 
humorists, who co-operate to supply fun for certain groups 
of periodicals. Of course, the great majority of these manu- 
facturers of jests for newspapers and comic almanacs are 
doomed to swift oblivion. But it is not so certain that the 
best of the class, like Clemens and Browne, will not long 
continue to be read as illustrative of one side of the Amer- 
ican mind, or that their best things will not survive as long as 
the mots of Sydney Smith, which are still as current as ever. 
One of the earliest of them was Seba Smith, who, under 
the name of " Major Jack Downing," did his best to make 
Jackson's administration ridiculous. B. P. Shillaber's " Mrs. 
Partington " — a sort of American Mrs. Malaprop — enjoyed 
great vogue before the war. Of a somewhat higher kind 
were the Phoenixiana, 1855, and Squihob Papers, 1856, of 



190 Initial Studies ix American Letters. 

Lieutenant George H. Derby, " John Phoenix," one of the 
pioneers of literature on the Pacific coast at the time of the 
California gold fever of '49. Derby's proposal for A Neio 
System of English Grammar, his satirical account of the 
topographical survey of the two miles of road between San 
Francisco and the Mission Dolores, and his picture gallery 
y made out of the conventional houses, steam-boats, rail-cars, 
runaway Negroes, and other designs which used to ligure in 
the advertising columns of the newspapers, were all very in- 
genious and clever. But all these pale before Artemus Ward 
— " Artemus the delicious," as Charles Reade called him — 
who first secured for this peculiarly American type of humor 
a hearing and reception abroad. Ever since the invention of 
Hosea Biglow, an imaginary personage of some sort, under 
cover of whom the author might conceal his own identity, 
has seemed a necessity to our humorists, Artemus Ward 
was a traveling showman who went about the country exhib- 
iting a collection of wax " tiggers " and whose experiences 
and reflections were reported in grammar and spelling of a 
most ingeniously eccentric kind. His inventor was Charles 
F. Browne, originally of Maine, a printer by trade and after- 
ward a newspaper writer and editor at Boston, Toledo, and 
Cleveland, where his comicalities in the Pkundealer first be- 
gan to attract notice. Li 1860 he came to New York and 
joined the staff of Vanity Fair, a comic weekly of much 
brightness, Avhich ran a short career and perished for Avant 
of capital. When Browne began to appear as a public lect- 
urer, people who had formed aif idea of him from his imper- 
sonation of the shrewd and vulgar old showman were sur- 
prised to find him a gentlemanly-looking young man, who 
came upon the platform in correct evening dress, and " spoke 
his piece " in a quiet and somewhat mournful manner, stopping 
in aj^parent surprise when any one in the audience laughed at 
any uncommonly outrageous absurdity. In London, where 
he delivered his Lecture on the Mormons, in 1866, the gravity 



Literature Since 1861. 191 

of his bearing at first imposed upon liis hearers, who had 
come to the hall in search of instructive information and 
were disappointed at the inadequate nature of the j^anorama 
which Browne had had made to illustrate his lecture. Occa- 
sionally some hitch would occur in the machinery of this and 
the lecturer would leave the rostrum for a few moments to 
" work the moon " that shone upon the Great Salt Lake, 
apologizing on his return on the ground that he was " a man 
short" and offering "to pay a good salary to" any respectable 
boy of good parentage and education who is a good moon- 
ist." When it gradually dawned npon the British intellect 
that these and similar devices of the lecturer — such as the 
soft music which he had the pianist play at pathetic passages 
— nay, that the panorama and even the lecture itself were of 
a humorous intention, the joke began to take, and Artemus's 
success in England became assured. He was erajjloyed as 
one of the editors of Punch, but died at Southampton in the 
year following. 

. Some of Artemus Ward's effects were produced by cacog- 
raphy or bad spelling, but there was genius in the wildly er- 
ratic way in which he handled even this rather low order of 
humor. It is a cui-ious commentary on the wretchedness of 
our English orthography that the phonetic spelling of a word, 
as for example, tvnz for was, should be in itself an occasion of 
mirth. Other verbal effects of a different kind were among 
his devices, as in the passage where the seventeen widows of 
a deceased Mornion offered themselves to Artemus. 

"And I said, 'Why is this thus? What is the reason of 
this thusness?' They hove a sigh — seventeen sighs of dif- 
ferent size. They said : 

" ' O, soon thou will be gonested away.' 

"I told them that when I got ready to leave a place I 
wentested. 

"They said, 'Doth not like us ?' 

" I said, ' I doth— 1 doth.' 



192 Initial Studies in Amkrican Letters. 

" I also said, ' I hope your intentions are honorable, as I am 
a lone child — ray parents being far — far away.' 

" They then said, ' Wilt not marry us ? ' 

" I said, ' O no, it cannot was.' 

" When they cried, 'O cruel man! this is too much! — O! 
too much,' I told them that it was on account of the much- 
ness that I declined." 

It is hard to define the difference between the humor of 
one writer and another, or of one nation and another. It 
can be felt and can be illustrated by quoting exam])k>s, 
but scarcely described in general terms. ' It has been said 
of that class of American humorists of which ArtemuS 
Ward is a representative that their peculiarity consists in 
extravagance, surprise, audacity, and irreverence.^ But all 
these qualities have characterized other schools of humor. 
There is the same element of surprise in De Quincey's anti- 
climax, " Many a man has dated his ruin from some niui-- 
der or other which, perhaps, at the time he thought little 
of," as in Artemus's truism that "a comic paper ought 
to publish a joke now and then." The violation of logic 
which makes us laugh at an Irish bull is likewise the source 
of the humor in Artemus's saying of Jeff Davis, that "it 
would have been better than ten dollars in his pocket if 
he had never been born;" or in his advice, "Always live 
within your income, even if you have to borrow money to do 
90 ; " or, again, in his announcement that " Mr. Ward will 
pay no debts of his own contracting." A kind of ludicrous 
confusion, caused by an unusual collocation of words, is also 
one of his favorite tricks, as when he says of Brigham 
Y"oung, "He's the most married man I ever saw in my life;" 
or when, having been drafted at several hundred different 
places where he had been exhibiting his wax figures, he says 
that if he went on he should soon become a regiment, and 
adds, "I never knew that there was so many of me." With 
this a whimsical understatement and an affectation of 



Literature Since 1861. 193 

simplicity, as where he expresses his willingness to sacrifice 
"even his wife's relations" on the altar of patriotism; or 
where, in delightful unconsciousness of his own sins against 
orthography, he pronounces that " Chaucer was a great poet 
but he couldn't spell," or where he says of the feast of raw 
dog, tendered him by the Indian chief, Wocky-bocky, "It 
don't agree with me. I prefer simple food." On the whole, 
it may be said of original humor of this kind, as of other 
forms of originality in literature, that the elements of it are 
old, but their combinations are novel. Other humorists, like 
Henry W. Shaw ("Josh Billings") and David R. Locke 
(" Petroleum V. Nasby "), have used bad spelling as a part 
of their machinery; while Robert H. Newell (" Orpheus C. 
Kerr"), Samuel L. Clemens ("Mark Twain"), and more 
recently " Bill Nye," though belonging to the same school of 
low or broad comedy, have discarded cacography. Of these 
the most eminent, by all odds, is Mark Twain, who has 
probably made more people laugh than any other living 
Avriter. A Missourian by birth (1835), he served the usual 
apprenticeship at type-setting and editing country newspa- 
pers; spent seven years as a pilot on a Mississippi steam- 
boat, and seven years more mining and journalizing in 
Nevada, Avhere he conducted the Virginia City Etiteiyrise; 
finally drifted to San Francisco, and was associated with 
Bret Harte on the Calif ornian, and in 1867 published his 
first book. The Jumping Frog. This was succeeded by the 
Innocents Abroad^ 1869; Houghing It, 1872; A Tramj) 
Abroad, 1880, and by others not so good. 

Mark Twain's drolleries have frequently the same air of 
innocence and surj^rise as Artemus Ward's, and there is a 
like suddenness in his turns of expression, as where he S2:)eaks 
of "the calm confidence of a Christian with four aces." If 
he did not originate, he at any rate employed very effectively 
that now familiar device of the newspaper "funny man," of 
putting a painful situation euphemistically, as when he says 
13 



194 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

of a man who was liauged that he "received mjuries which 
terminated in his death." He uses to the full extent the 
American humorist's favorite resources of exaggeration and 
irreverence. An instance of the former quality may be seen 
in his famous description of a dog chasing a coyote, in 
Roughing It, or in his interview with the lightning-rod agent 
in Mark Twabi's Sketches, 1875. He is a shrewd observer, 
and his humor has a more satirical side than Artemus Ward's, 
sometimes passing into downright denunciation. He delights 
particularly in ridiculing sentimental humbug and moralizing 
cant. He runs atilt, as has been said, at " copy-book texts," 
at the temperance reformer, the tract distributer, the Good 
Boy of Sunday-school literature, and the women who send 
bouquets and sympathetic letters to interesting criminals. 
He gives a ludicrous turn to famous historical anecdotes, 
such as the story of George Washington and his little hatchet; 
burlesques the time-honored adventure, in nautical romances, 
of the starving crew casting lots in the long-boat, and spoils 
the dignity of antiquity by modern trivialities, saying of a 
discontented sailor on Columbus's ship, " He wanted fresh 
shad." The fun of Innocents Abroad consists in this irrev- 
erent application of modern, common sense, utilitarian, 
democratic standards to the memorable places and historic 
associations of Europe. Tried by this test the Old Masters 
in tlie picture galleries become laughable, Abelard was a 
precious scoundrel, and the raptures of the guide-books are 
parodied without mercy. The tourist weeps at the grave of 
Adam. At Genoa he drives the cicerone to despair by pre- 
tending never to have heard of Christopher Columbus, and 
inquiring innocently, " Is he dead ? " It is Europe vulgar- 
ized and stripped of its illusions — Europe seen by a Western 
newspaper reporter witliout any " historic imagination." 

The method of this whole class of humorists is the oppo- 
site of Addison's or Irving's or Thackeray's. It does not 
amuse by the perception of the characteristic. It is not 



Literature Since 1861. 195 

founded upon truth, but upon incongruity, distortion, unex- 
pectedness. Every thing in life is reversed, as in opera 
bouffe, and turned topsy-turvy, so that paradox takes the 
place of the natural order of things. Nevertheless they 
have supplied a wholesome criticism upon sentimental ex- 
cesses, and the world is in their debt for many a hearty 
laugh. 

In the Atlantic Monthly for December, 1863, appeared a 
tale entitled The Man Without a Country, which made a 
great sensation, and did much to strengthen patriotic feel- 
ing in one of the darkest hours of the nation's history. It 
was the story of one Philip Nolan, an array officer, whose 
head had been turned by Aaron Burr, and who, having been 
censured by a court-martial for some minor offense, exclaimed 
petulantly, upon mention being made of the United States 
government, "Damn the United States! I wish that I might 
never hear the United States mentioned again." Thereupon 
he was sentenced to have his wish, and was kept all his life 
aboard the vessels of the navy, being sent off on long voyages 
and transferred from ship to ship, with orders to those in 
charge that his country and its concerns should never be 
spoken of in his presence. Such an air of reality was given 
to the narrative by incidental references to actual persons 
and occurrences that many believed it true, and some Avere 
found who remembered Philip Nolan, but had heard different 
versions of his career. The author of this clever hoax — if 
hoax it may be called — was Edwai'd Everett Hale, a Uni- 
tarian clergyman of Boston, who published a collection of 
stories in 1868, under the fantastic title, If, Yes, and Per- 
haps, indicating thereby that some of the tales were possible, 
some of them probable, and others might even be regarded as 
essentially true. A similar collection. His Level Best, and 
Other Stories, was published in 1873, and in the inteiwal three 
volumes of a somewhat different kind, the Ingham Papers 
and Syharis and Other Homes, both in 1869, and Ten Times 



196 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

One Is Ten, in 1871. The author shelters himself behind 
the imaginary figure of Captain Frederic Ingham, pastor of 
the Sandemanian Church at Naguadavick, and the same 
characters have a way of re-appearing in his successive vol- 
umes as old friends of the reader, which is pleasant at first, 
but in the end a little tiresome. Mr. Hale is one of the 
most original and ingenious of American story-writers. The 
old device of making wildly improbable inventions appear 
like fact by a realistic treatment of details — a device em- 
ployed by Swift and Edgar Poe, and more lately by Jules 
Verne — became quite fresh and novel in his hands, and was 
managed with a humor all his own. Some of his best stories 
are 3Iy Double and How He Undid Me, describing how a 
busy clergyman found an Irishman who looked so much like 
himself that he trained him to pass as his duplicate, and sent 
him to do duty in his stead at public meetings, dinners, etc., 
thereby escaping bores and getting time for real work; the 
Brick Moon, a story of a projectile built and launched into 
space, to revolve in a fixed meridian about the earth and 
serve mariners as a mark of longitude; the Rag Man and 
Mag Wo?na?i, a tale of an impoverished couple who made a 
competence by saving the pamphlets, advertisements, wed- 
ding-cards, etc., that came to them through the mail, and 
developing a paper business on that basis; and the /Skeleton 
in the Closet, which shows how the fate of the Southern 
Confederacy was involved in the adventures of a certain 
hoop-skirt, " built in the eclipse and rigged with curses 
dark." Mr. Hale's historical scholarship and his habit of 
detail have aided him in the art of giving vraisemblance to 
absurdities. He is known in philanthropy as well as in letters, 
and his tales have a cheerful, busy, practical way with them 
in consonance with his motto, " Look up and not down, look 
forward and not back, look out and not in, and lend a hand." 
It is too soon to sum up the literary history of the last 
quarter of a century. The writers who have given it shape 



Literature Since 1861, lOY 

are still writing, and their work is therefore incomplete. 
But on the slightest review of it two facts become manifest: 
first, that New England has lost its long monopoly; and, 
secondly, that a marked feature of the period is the growth 
of realistic fiction. The electric tension of the atmosphere 
for thirty years preceding the civil war, the storm and stress 
of great public contests, and the intellectual stir produced by 
transcendentalism seem to have been more favorable to poe- 
try and literary idealism than present conditions are. At 
all events there are no new poets who rank with Whittier, 
Longfellow, Lowell, and others of the elder generation, al- 
though George H. Boker, in Philadelphia, R. H, Stoddard 
and E. C. Stedman, in New York, and T. B. Aldrich, first in 
New York and afterward in Boston, have written creditable 
verse; not to speak of younger writers, whose work, how- 
ever, for the most part, has been more distinguished by del- 
icacy of execution than by native impulse. Mention has 
been made of the establishment of Harper's Monthly Maga- 
zine, which, under the conduct of its accomplished editor, 
George W. Curtis, has provided the public with an abun- 
dance of good reading. The old Putnam^s Monthly, which 
ran from 1853 to 1858, and had a strong corps of contribu- 
tors, was revived in 1868, and continued by that name till 
1870, when it was succeeded by Scribner^s Monthly, under 
the editorship of Dr. J. G. Holland, and this in 1881 by the 
Century, an efticient rival of Harper'' s in circulation, in liter- 
ary excellence, and in the beauty of its wood-engravings, the 
American school of which art these two great periodicals have 
done much to develop and encourage. Another New York 
monthly, the Galaxy, ran from 1866 to 1878, and was edited 
by Richard Grant White. Within the last few years a new 
Scribner''s Magazine has also taken the field. The Atlantic, 
in Boston, and Lippincotfs, in Philadelphia, are no unwor- 
thy competitors with these for public favor. 

During the forties began a new era of national expansion, 



198 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

somewhat resembling that described in a former chapter, and, 
like that, bearing fruit eventually in literature. The cession 
of Florida to the United States in 1845, and the annexation 
of Texas in the same year, were followed by the purchase of 
California in 1847, and its admission as a State in 1850. In 
1849 came the great rush to the California gold fields. San 
Francisco, at first a mere collection of tents and board shan- 
ties, with a few adobe huts, grew with incredible rapidity 
into a great city — the wicked and wonderful city apostro- 
phized by Bret Harte in his poem, San Francisco : 

" Serene, indifferent of fate, 
Thou sittest at the Western Gate; 
Upon thy heights so lately won 
Still slant the banners of the sun. . . . 
I know thy cunning and thy greed, 
Thy hard, high lust and willful deed." 

The adventurers of all lands and races who flocked to the 
Pacific coast found there a motley state of society between 
civilization and savagery. There were the relics of the old 
Mexican occuj^ation, the Spanish missions, with their Chris- 
tianized Indians; the wild tribes of the plains — Apaches, 
Utes, and Navajoes; the Chinese coolies and washermen, all 
elements strange to the Atlantic sea-board and the States of 
the interior. The gold-hunters crossed, in stages or cara- 
vans, enormous prairies, alkaline deserts dotted with sage- 
brush and seamed by deep canons, and passes through 
gigantic mountain ranges. On the coast itself nature was 
unfamiliar: the climate was subtropical; fruits and vegeta- 
bles grew to a mammoth size, corresponding to the enormous 
redwoods in the Mariposa groves and the prodigious scale of 
the scenery in the valley of the Yosemite and the snow- 
capped peaks of the sierras. At first thei-e were few women, 
and the men led a wild, lawless existence in the mining 
camps. Hard upon the heels of the prospector followed the 



Literature Since 1861. 199 

dram-shop, the garabling-hell, and tlie dance-hall. Every 
man-carried his " Colt," and looked out for his own life and 
liis "claim." Crime went unpunished or was taken in hand, 
when it got too rampant, by vigilance committees. In the 
diggings shaggy frontiersmen and "pikes" from Missouri 
mingled with the scum of eastern cities and Avith broken- 
down business men and young college graduates seeking 
their fortune. Surveyors and geologists came of necessity, 
speculators in mining stock and city lots set up their offices in 
the town; later came a sprinkling of school-teachers and min- 
isters. Fortunes were made in one day and lost the next at 
poker or loo. To-day the lucky miner who had struck a good 
" lead " was drinking champagne out of pails and treating the 
town; to-morrow he was " busted," and shouldered the pick 
for a new onslaught upon his luck. This strange, reckless 
life was not without fascination, and highly picturesque and 
dramatic elements were present in it. It was, as Bret Harte 
says, "an era replete with a certain heroic Greek poetry," and 
sooner or later it was sure to find its poet. During the war 
California remained loyal to the Union, but was too far from 
the seat of conflict to experience any serious disturbance, and 
went on independently developing its own resources and 
becoming daily more civilized. By 1868 San Francisco had 
a literary magazine, the Overland Monthly, which ran until 
18*75, and was revived in 1883. It had a decided local flavor, 
and the vignette on its title-page was a happily chosen em- 
blem, representing a grizzly bear crossing a railway track. 
In an early number of the Overland was a story entitled 
the Luck of Roaring Camp, by Francis Bret Harte, a native 
of Albany, N. Y. (1835), who had come to California at the 
age of seventeen, in time to catch the unique aspects of the 
life of the Forty-niners, before their vagabond communities 
had settled down into the law-abiding society of the present 
day. His first contribution was followed by other stories 
and sketches of a similar kind, such as the Outcasts of Poker 



200 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

Flat^ Miggles, and Tennessee's Partner ; and by verses, 
serious and humorous, of which last, Plain Language from 
Truthful James, better known as the Heathen Chinee, made 
an immediate hit, and carried its author's name into every 
corner of the English-speaking world. In 1871 he published 
a collection of his tales, another of his poems, and a 
volume of very clever parodies, Condensed Novels, which 
rank with Thackeray's Novels by Eminent Hands. Bret 
Harte's California stories were vivid, highly colored pictures 
of life in the mining camps and raw towns of the Pacific 
coast. The pathetic and the grotesque went hand in hand 
in them, and the author aimed to show how even in the des- 
perate characters gathered together there — the fortune- 
hunters, gamblers, thieves, murderers, drunkards, and prosti- 
tutes — the latent nobility of human nature asserted itself 
in acts of heroism, magnanimity, self-sacrifice, and touching 
fidelity. The same men who cheated at cards and shot each 
another down with tipsy curses were capable on occasion of 
the most romantic generosity and the most delicate chivalry. 
Critics were not wanting who held that, in the matter of 
dialect and manners and other details, the narrator was not 
true to the facts. This was a comparatively unimportant 
charge; but a more serious question was the doubt whether 
his characters were essentially true to human nature; whether 
the wild soil of revenge and greed and dissolute living ever 
yields such flowers of devotion as blossom in Tennesseis 
Partner and the Outcasts of PoJcer Flat. However this 
may be, there is no question as to Harte's power as a narra- 
tor. His short stories are skillfully constructed and effect- 
ively told. They never drag, and are never overladen with 
description, reflection, or other lumber. 

In his poems in dialect we find the same variety of types 
and nationalities characteristic of the Pacific coast: the little 
Mexican maiden, Pachita, in the old mission garden; the 
wicked Bill Nye, who tries to cheat the Heathen Chinee 



Literature Since 1861. 201 

at euclier and to rob Injin Dick of his winning lottery- 
ticket; the geological society on the Stanislaw who 
settle their scientific debates with chunks of old red sand- 
stone and the skulls of mammoths; the unlucky Mr. Dow, 
who finally strikes gold while digging a well, and builds a 
house with a "coopilow;" and Flynn, of Virginia, who 
saves his "pard's " life, at the sacrifice of his own, by hold- 
ing up the timbers in the caving tunnel. These poems are 
mostly in monologue, like Browning's dramatic lyrics, ex- 
clamatory and abrupt in style, and with a good deal of in- 
dicated action, as in Jim, where a miner comes into a bar- 
room, looking for his old chum, learns that he is dead, and 
is just turning away to hide his emotion when he recog- 
nizes Jim in his informant: 

*' Well, thar— Good-bye- 
No more, sir — I — 

Eh? 
What's that you say ?— 
Why, dern it 1 — sho! — 
No? Yes! By Jo! 

Soldi 
Sold! Why, you limb I ' 
You ornery, 

Derned old 
Long-legged Jim I " 

Bret Harte had many imitators, and not only did our news- 
paper poetry for a number of years abound in the properties 
of Californian life, such as gulclies, placers, divides, etc., but 
writers further east applied his method to other conditions. 
Of these by far the most successful was John Hay, a native 
of Indiana and private secretary to President Lincoln, whose 
Little Breeches, Jim Bludso, and Mystery of Gilgal have 
rivaled Bret Harte's own verses in popularity. In the last- 
named piece the reader is given to feel that there is some- 
thing rather cheerful and humorous in a bar-room fight 



202 Initial Studies in American Letters, 

which results in "the gals that winter, as a rule," going 
"alone to sinofino- school." In the two former we have 
heroes of the Bret Harte type, the same combination of su- 
perficial wickedness with inherent loyalty and tenderness. 
The profane farmer of the South-west, who " doesn't pan out 
on the prophets," and who had taught Ids little son "to 
chaw terbacker, just to keep his milk-teeth white," but who 
believes in God and the angels ever since the miraculous re- 
covery of the same little son when lost on the prairie in a 
blizzard; and the unsaintly and bigamistic captain of the 
Prairie Belle, who died like a hero, holding the nozzle of his 
burning boat against the bank 

" Till the last galoot's ashore." 

The manners and dialect of other classes and sections of 
the country have received abundant illustration of late years. 
Edward Eggleston's Hoosier Schoolmaster, 1871, and his 
other novels are pictures of rural life in the early days of In- 
diana. Western Windows, a volume of poems by John 
James Piatt, another native of Indiana, had an unmistakable 
local coloring. Charles G. Leland, of Philadelphia, in his 
Hans Breitmann ballads, in, dialect, gave a humorous pres- 
entation of the German-American element in the cities. By 
the death, in 1881, of Sidney Lanier, a Georgian by birth, 
the South lost a poet of rare promise, whose original genius 
was somewhat hampered by his hesitation between two arts 
of expression, music and verse, and by his effort to co-ordi- 
nate them. His Science of English Verse, 1880, was a most 
suggestive, though hardly convincing, statement of that 
theory of their relation Avliich he was working out in his 
practice. Some of his pieces, like the Mocking Bird and 
the Song of the Chattahoochie, ai-e the most characteristically 
Southern poetry that has been written in America. Joel 
Chandler Harris's Uncle RernKS stories, in Negro dialect, are 
transcripts from the folk-lore of the plantations, while his 



Literature Since 1861. 203 

collection of stories, At Teague Poteefs, together with Miss 
Murfree's In the Tennessee Trfotintains and lier other books, 
have made the Northern public familiar with the wild life of 
the " moonshiners," who distill illicit whiskey in the mount- 
ains of Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee. These 
tales are not only exciting in incident, but strong and fresh 
in their delineations of character. Their descriptions of 
mountain scenery are also impressive, though, in the case of 
the last-named writer, frequently too prolonged. George 
W. Cable's sketches of French Creole life in New Orleans 
attracted attention by their freshness and quaintness when 
published in the magazines and re-issued in book form as 
Old Creole Days, in 1879. His first regular novel, the 
Grandissimes, 1880, was likewise a story of Creole life. It 
had the same winning qualities as his short stories and 
sketches, but was an advance upon them in dramatic force, 
especially in the intensely ti'agic and powerfully told episode 
of " Bras Coupe." Mr. Cable has continued his studies of 
Louisiana types and ways in his later books, but the Gran- 
dissimes still remains his masterpiece. ( All in all, he is, thu^., 
far, the most important literary figure of the New South,' 
and the justness and delicacy of his representations of life 
speak volumes for the sobering and refining agency of the 
civil war in the States whose " cause " was " lost," but whose 
true interests gained even more by the loss than did the in- 
terests of the victorious North. 

The four writers last mentioned have all come to the front 
within the past eight or ten years, and, in accordance with 
the plan of this sketch, receive here a mere passing notice. 
It remains to close our review of the literary history of the 
period since the war with a somewhat more extended ac- 
count of the two favorite novelists whose work has done 
more than any thing else to shape the movement of recent 
fiction. These are Henry James, Jr., and William Dean 
Howells. Their writings, though dissimilar in some respects, 



204 ImriAii Studies in American' Lettees. 

are alike in this, that they are analytic in method and real- 
istic in spirit. Cooper was a romancer pure and simple ; he 
wrote the romance of adventure and of external incident. 
Hawthorne went much deeper, and with a finer sjjiritual in- 
sight dealt with the real passions of the heart and with 
men's inner experiences. This he did with truth and power; 
but, although himself a keen observer of whatever passed 
before his eyes, he was not careful to secure a photographic 
fidelity to the surface facts of speech, dress, manners, etc. 
Thus the talk of his characters is book-talk, and not the 
actual language of the parlor or the street, with its slang, its 
colloquial ease and the intonations and shadings of phrase 
and pronunciation which mark different sections of the coun- 
try and different grades of society. His attempts at dialect, 
for example, were of the slenderest kind. His art is ideal, 
and his romances certainly do not rank as novels of real life. 
But with the growth of a richer and more complicated so- 
ciety in America fiction has grown more social and more 
minute in its observation. It would not be fair to classify 
the novels of James and Howells as the fiction of manners 
merely ; they are also the fiction of character, but they aim 
to describe people not only as they are, in their inmost nat- 
ures, but also as they look and talk and dress. ^ They try to 
express character through manners, which is the way in 
which it is most often expressed in the daily existence of a 
conventional society. It is a principle of realism not to se- 
lect exceptional persons or occurrences, but to take average 
^^ men and women and their average experiences. The realists 
protest that the moving incident is not their trade, and that 
the stories have all been told. They want no plot and no 
hero. They will tell no rounded tale with a denouement^ in 
which all the parts are distributed, as in the fifth act of an 
old-fashioned comedy; but they will take a transcript from 
life and end when they get through, without informing the 
reader what becomes of the characters. And they will try 



LlTEKATUEE SiNCE 1861. 205 

to interest this reader in " poor real life " with its " foolish 
face." Their acknowledged masters are Balzac, George 
Eliot, TurgenieflP, and Anthony Trollope, and they regard 
novels as studies in sociology, honest reports of the writers' 
impressions, which may not be without a certain scientific 
value even. 

Mr. James's peculiar province is the international novel, a 
field which he created for himself, but which he has occupied 
in company with Howells, Mrs. Burnett, and many others. 
The novelist received most of his schooling in Europe, and 
has lived much abroad, with the result that he has become 
half denationalized and has engrafted a cosmopolitan indif- 
fei'ence upon his Yankee inheritance. This, indeed, has 
constituted his opportunity. A close observer and a con- 
scientious student of the literary art, he has added to his in- 
tellectual equipment the advantage of a curious doubleness 
in his point of view. He looks at America with the eyes of 
a foreigner and at Europe with the eyes of an American. 
He has so far thi-own himself out of relation with American 
life that he describes a Boston horse-car or a New York 
hotel table with a sort of amused wonder. His starting- 
point was in criticism, and he has always maintained the 
critical attitude. He took up story-writing in order to help 
himself, by practical experiment, in his chosen ai"t of literary 
criticism, and his volume on French Poets and Novelists^ 
1878, is by no means the least valuable of his books. His 
short stories in the magazines were collected into a volume 
in 1875, with the title, A Passionate Pilgrim, and Other 
Stories. One or two of these, as the Ijast of the Valerii and 
the Madonna of the Future, suggest Hawthorne, a very un- 
sympathetic study of whom James afterward contributed to 
the " English Men of Letters " series. But in the name-story 
of the collection he was already in the line of his future de- 
velopment. This is the story of a middle-aged invalid 
American who comes to England in search of health, and 



206 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

finds, too late, in the mellow atmosphere of the mother-coun- 
try, the repose and the congenial surroundings Avhich he has 
all his life been longing for in "his raw America. The ^lathos 
of his self-analysis and his confession of failure is subtly imag- 
ined. The impressions which ho and his far-away English 
kinsfolk make on one another, their mutual attraction and 
repulsion, are described Avith that delicate perception of na- 
tional differences which makes the humor and sometimes the 
tragedy of James's later books, like Tlie American, Daisy 
Miller, The Europeans, and An International Episode. His 
first novel was Roderick Hudson, 1876, not the most charac- 
teristic of his fictions, but perhaps the most powerful in its 
grasp of elementary passion. The analytic method and the 
critical attitude have their dangers in imaginative literature. 
In proportion as this writer's faculty of minute observation 
and his realistic objectivity have increased upon him, the un- 
comfortable coldness which is felt in his youthful Avork has 
become actually disagreeable, and his art — growing con- 
stantly finer and surer in matters of detail — has seemed to 
dwell more and more in the region of mere manners and less 
in the higher realm of character and passion. In most of his 
writings the heart, somehow, is left out. We have seen that 
Irving, from his knowledge of England and America, and his 
long residence in both countries, became the mediator be- 
tween the two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon race. 
This he did by the power of his sympathy with each. Henry 
James has likewise interpreted the two nations to one an- 
other in a subtler but less genial fashion than Irving, and 
not through sympathy, but through contrast, by bringing 
into relief the opposing ideals of life and society which have 
developed under different institutions. In his novel, The 
American, 1877, he has shown the actual misery which may 
result from the clashing of opposed social systems. In such 
clever sketches as Daisi/ Miller, 1879, the Pension Beaure- 
paSj and A Bundle of Letters^ he has exhibited types of the 



Literature Since 1861. 201 

American girl, the American business man, the aesthetic 
feebling from Boston, and theEuropeanized or would-be dena- 
tionalized American campaigners in tlie Old World, and has 
set forth the ludicrous incongruities, perplexities, and misun- 
derstandings which result from contradictory standards of 
conventional morality and behavior. In The Euroiyeans, 
1879, and An International Episode, 1878, he has reversed 
the process, bringing Old World standards to the test of 
American ideas by ti'ansf erring his dramatis personm to re- 
publican soil. The last-named of these illustrates how slen- 
der a plot realism requires for its purposes. It is nothing 
more than the history of an English girl of good family who 
marries an American gentleman and undertakes to live in 
America, but finds herself so uncomfortable in strange social 
conditions that she returns to England for life, while, con- 
trariwise, the heroine's sister is so taken with the freedom of 
these very conditions that she elopes with another Amei-ican 
and " goes West." James is a keen observer of the physi- 
ognomy of cities as Avell as of men, and his Portraits of 
Places, 1884, is among the most delightful contributions to 
the literature of foreign travel. 

Mr. Howells's writings are not without "international" 
touches. In A Foregone Conclusion and the Lady of the 
AroostooJc, and others of his novels, the contrasted points of 
view in Amei'ican and European life are introduced, and es- 
pecially tliose variations in feeling, custom, dialect, etc., 
which make the modern Englishman and the modern Amer- 
ican such objects of curiosity to each other, and which have 
been dwelt upon of late even unto satiety. But in general 
he finds his subjects at home, and if he does not know his 
own countrymen and countrywomen more intimately than 
Mr. James, at least he loves them better. There is a warmer 
sentiment in his fictions, too; his men are better fellows and 
his women are more lovable. Ho wells was born in Ohio. 
His early life was that of a western country editor. In 1 860 he 



208 Initial Studies in American Letters, 

published, jointly with his friend Piatt, a book of verse — 
Poems of Two Friends. In 1861 he was sent as consul to 
Venice, and tiie literary results of his sojourn there appeared 
in his sketches, Venetian Life, 1865, and Italian Journeys., 
1867. In 1871 he became editor of the Atlantic Monthly., 
and in the same year published his Suburban Sketches. All 
of these early volumes showed a quick eye for the pict- 
uresque, an unusual power of description, and humor of the 
most delicate quality; but as yet there was little approach to 
narrative. Their Wedding Journey was a revelation to the 
public of the interest that may lie in an ordinary bridal trip 
across the State of New York, when a close and sympathetic 
observation is brought to bear upon the characteristics of 
American life as it appears at railway stations and hotels, on 
steam-boats and in the streets of very commonplace towns. 
A Chance Acquaintance, 1873, was Howells's first novel, 
though even yet the story was set against a background of 
travel-pictures. A holiday trip on the St. Lawrence and the 
Saguenay, with descriptions of Quebec and the Falls of 
Montmorenci, etc., rather predominated over the narrative. 
Thus, gradually and by a natural process, complete char- 
acters and realistic novels, such as A Modern Instance, 1882, 
and Indian Summer, evolved themselves from truthful 
sketches of places and persons seen by the way. 

The incompatibility existing between European and Amer- 
ican views of life, Avhich makes the comedy or the tragedy 
of Henry James's international fictions, is replaced in How- 
ells's novels by the repulsion between differing social grades in 
the same country. The adjustment of these subtle distinc- 
tions forms a part of the problem of life in all complicated 
societies. Thus in A Chance Acquaintance the heroine is a 
bright and pretty Western girl, who becomes engaged dur- 
ing a pleasure tour to an irreproachable but offensively prig- 
gish young gentleman from Boston, and the engagement is 
broken by her in consequence of an unintended slight — the 



LiTERATUKE SiNOE 1861. 209 

betrayal on tlio liero's part of a shade of mortification wlien 
he and his betrothed are suddenly brought into the presence 
t)f some fashionable ladies belonging to his own inonde. The 
little comedy, Out of the Question, deals with this same 
adjustment of social scales; and in many of Ilowells's other 
novels, such as Silas Laphcua and the Lady of the Aroos- 
took, one of the main motives may be described to be the 
contact of the man who eats with his fork with the man 
who eats with his knife, and the shock thereby ensuing. In 
Indian Summer the complications arise from the difference 
in age between the hero and heroine, and not from a differ- 
ence in station or social antecedents. In all of these fictions 
the misunderstandings come from an incompatibility of man- 
ners rather than of character, and, if any thing were to be 
objected to the probability of the story, it is that the climax 
hinges on delicacies and subtleties which, in real life, when 
there is opportunity for explanations, are readily brushed 
aside. But in A Modem Instance Howells touched the 
deeper springs of action. In this, his strongest work, the 
catastrophe is brought about, as in George Eliot's great 
novels, by the reaction of characters upon one another, and 
the story is realistic in a higher sense than any mere study 
of manners can be. His nearest aj^proach to romance is in 
The Undisfovered Country, 1880, which deals with the Spir- 
itualists and the Shakers, and in its study of problems that 
hover on the borders of the supernatural, in its out-of-the- 
way personages and adventures, and in a certain ideal poetic 
flavor about the whole book, has a strong resemblance to 
Hawthorne, especially to Hawthorne in the Blithedale lio- 
mance, where he comes closer to common ground with other 
romancers. It is interesting to compare the Undiscovered 
Country with Henry James's Bostoidans, the latest and one 
of the cleverest of his fictions, which is likewise a study of 
the clairvoyants, mediums, woman's rights advocates, and 
all varieties of cranks, reformers, and patrons of " causes," 
U 



210 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

for whom Boston has long been notorious. A most un- 
lovely race of people they become under the cold scrutiny of 
Mr. James's cosmoj^olitan eyes, which see more clearly the 
charlatanism, narrow-mindedness, mistaken fanaticism, mor- 
bid self-consciousness, disagreeable nervous intensity, and vul- 
gar or ridiculous outside peculiarities of the humanitarians, 
than the nobility and moral enthusiasm which underlie the 
surface. 

Howells is almost the only successful American dramatist, 
and this in the field of parlor comedy. His little forces, the 
Elevator, the Register, the Parlor- Car, etc., have a lightness 
and grace, with an exquisitely abstud situation, which reinind 
us more of the Comedies et Proverhes of Alfred de Musset, 
or the many agreeable dialogues and monologu(?s of the 
French domestic stage, than of any work of English or 
American hands. His softly ironical yet affectionate treat- 
ment of feminine ways is especially admirable. In his numer- 
ous types of sweetly illogical, inconsistent, and inconsequent 
womanhood he has perpetuated with a nicer art than Dickens 
what Thackeray calls " that great discovery," Mrs. Nickleby. 



1. Theodore Winthrop. Life in the Open Air. Cecil 
Dreeme. 

2. Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Life in a Black Reg' 
inient. 

3. Poetry of the Civil War. ^dited by Richard Grant 
White. New York. 1866. ^ 

4. Charles Farrar Browne. Artetmis Ward — His Book. 
Lecture on the Jformons. Artemus Ward in London. 

5. Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Tlie Jumping Prog. 
Roughing It. The Mississippi Pilot. 

6. Charles Godfrey Leland. Hans Breitniann'^ s Ballads. 
1. Edward Everett Hale. If, Yes, and Perhaps. His 

Level Best, and Other Stories. 



Literature Since 1861. 211 

8. Francis Bret Harte. Outcasts of Poker Flat, and Other 
Stories. Condensed JVbvels. Poems in Dialect. 

9. Sidney Lanier. JVirvdna. Pesm'rection. The Har- 
lequin of Dreams. Song of the Chattahoochie. The Mock- 
ing Bird. The Stirrup - Cup. Tampa Robins. The Dee. 
The Revenge of Ilamish. The Ship of Earth. The Marsh- 
es of Glynn. Sunrise. 

10. Henry James, Jr. xi Passionate Pilgrim. Roderick 
Hudson. Daisy Miller. Pension Deaurepas. A Dandle 
of Letters. An I) iter national Episode. T/ie Do-stonians. 
Portraits of Places. 

11. William Dean Ilowells. Their Wedding Journey. 
Suburban Sketches. A CJtance Acquaintance. A Foregone 
Conclusion. The Undiscovered Country. A Modern In' 
stance. 

12. George W. Cable. Old Creole Days. Madaine Del- 
phine. Tlie Grandissinies, 

13. Joel Chandler Harris. Uncle Remus. Mingo, and 
Other Sketches. 

14. Charles Egbert Craddock (Miss Murfree). In the 
Tennessee Mountains. 



APPENDIX. 



APPENDIX. 



cotton mather, 
Captain Phips and the Spanish Wreck. "^ ^ 

[From MagnalUx Christi Americana.'i 

Captain Phips, arriving with a ship and a tender at Port do la Plata, 
made a stout canoe of a stately cotton-tree, so large as to carry eight or ten 
oars, for the making of which periaga (as they call it) ho did, with the same 
industry that he did every thing else, employ his own hand and adze, and 
endure no little hardship, lying abroad in the woods many nights together. 
This periaga with the tender, being anchored at a place convenient, the 
periaga kept busking to and again,' but could only discover a reef of rising 
shoals thereabouts, called " The Boilers," which, rising to be within two or 
three feet of the surface of the sea, were yet so steep that a ship striking on 
them would immediately sink down, who coidd say how many fathom, into 
the ocean. Here they could get no other pay for their long peeping among 
the Boilers, but only such as caused them to think upon returning to their 
captain with the bad news of tlieir total disappointment. Nevertheless, as 
they were upon their return, one of the men, looking over tlie side of the 
periaga into the calm water, he spied a sea-feather growing, as he judged, 
out of a rock ; whereupon he bade one of their Indians to dive and fetch 
this feather, that they might, however, carry home something with them, 
and make at least as fair a triumph as Caligula's.^ The diver, bringing up 
the feather, brought therewithal a surprising story, that he perceived a 
number of great guns in the watery world where he had found his feather ; 
the report^ of which great guns exceedingly astonished the whole company, 
and at once turned their despondencies for their ill success into assurances 
that they had now lit upon the true spot of ground which they had been 
looking for; and they were further confirmed in these assurances when, 

' Passinsr to and fro. 

2 The Roman emperor who invaded Britain unsuccessfully and made his legionaries 
gather sea-shells to bring back with theiu as evidences of victory. 
^ One of Mather's puns. 



216 Initial Studiks in American Letters. 

upon further diving, tlie Indian fetclied up a sow, as they styled it, or a hirap 
of silver worth perhaps two or three hundred pounds. Upon this tliey pru- 
dently buoyed the place that they might readily find it again ; and they 
went back unto their captain, whom for some while they distressed with 
nothing but such bad news as they formerly thought they must have carried 
him. Nevertlieless, they so slipped in the sow of silver on one side under the 
table, wliere they were now sitting with the captain, and hearing him ex- 
press his resolutions to wait still patiently upon the providence of God un- 
der these disappointments, that when he should look on one side he might 
see that odd thing before him. At last he saw it. Seeing it he cried out 
with some agony, "Whyl what is this? "Whence comes this?" And 
then, with changed countenances, they told him how and where they got 
it. " Then," said he, " thanks be to God 1 We are made ; " and so away 
they went all hands to work ; wherein they had tliis one further piece of 
remarkable prosperity, that whereas if they had first fallen upon that part 
of the Spanish wreck where the pieces of eight ' had been stowed in 
bags among the ballast they had seen a more laborious and less enricliiug 
time of it; now, most happily, they first fell upon that room in the 
wreck where the bullion had been stored up ; and lliey so prospered in 
this new fishery that in 'a little while they had, without the loss of any 
man's life, brought up thirty-two tuns of silver ; for it was now come 
to measuring of silver by tuns. Besides which, one Adderly, of Provi- 
dence, who had formerly been very helpful to Captain Phips in the 
search of this wreck, did, upon former agreement, meet him now with a 
little vessel here; and he with his few hands, took up about six tuns of 
silver ; whereof, nevertheless, he made so little use that in a year or two 
lie died at Bermudas, and, as I have heard, he rau distracted some wliile 
before he died. 

Thus did there once again come into the light of the sun a treasure 
which had been half an hundred years groaning under the waters; and 
in this time there was grown upon the plate a crust-like limestone, to 
the thickness of several inches; which crust being broken open by iron 
contrived for that purpose, they knocked out whole bushels of rusty 
pieces of eight which were grown thereinto. Besides that incredible 
treasure of plate in various forms thus fetched up from seven or eight 
fathom under water, there were vast riches of gold, and pearls, and jewels, 
which they also lit upon ; and, indeed, for a more comprehensive invoice, 
I must but summarily say, "All that a Spanish frigate uses to be en- 
riched withal." 

' Spanish piasters, formerly divided into eight reals. The piaster = an Amerieau 
dollar. 



Jonathan P^dwards. 217 

JONATHAN EDWARDS. 

The Beauty of Holiness. 

[From the author's Personal Narrative.] 

Holiness, as 1 then wrote down some of my contemplations on it, ap- 
peared to nie to be of a sweet, pleasant, charming, serene, calm nature ; 
which brought an inexpressible purity, brightness, peacefuhiess, and ravish- 
ment to the soul. In other words, that it made tiie soul like a field or gar- 
den of God, with all manner of pleasant flowers; enjoyhig a sweet calm 
and the gently vivifying beams of the sun. The soul of a true Cliristian, as 
I then wrote my meditations, appeared like such a little white flower as we 
see in the spring of the year ; low and humble on the ground, opening its 
bosom to receive the pleasant beams of the sun's glory ; rejoicing, as it 
were, in a calm rapture ; diffusing around a sweet fragrancj' ; standing 
peacefully and lovingly in the midst of other flowers round about ; all in 
like manner opening tlieir bosoms to drink in the light of the sun. There 
was no part of creature-holiness that I had so great a sense of its loveliness 
as humility, brokenness of lieart, and poverty of spirit; and there was 
nothing that I so earnestly longed for. My heart panted after this— to lie 
low before God, as in the dust; that I might be nothing, and that God 
might be all ; that I might become as a little child. 

The Wrath of God. . 

[From Sinners in the Hands nf an Angrij Gnd.] 

Unconverted men walk over the pit of hell on a rotten covering, and 
tliere are innumerable places in this covering so weak that they will not 
bear their weight, and these places are not seen. The arrows of death tiy 
imseeu at noonday ; the sharpest sight cannot discern them. God has so 
many different, unsearchable ways of taking wicked men out of the world and 
sending them to hell that there is notliing to make it appear that God had 
need to be at the expense of a miracle, or go out of the ordinary course of 
his providence, to destroy any wicked man at any moment. . . . Your 
wickedness makes you as it were heavy as lead and to tend downward with 
great weight and pressure toward hell; and, if God should let you go, yt)u 
would immediately sink and swiftly descend and plunge into the bottomless 
gulf, and your healthy constitution, and your own care and prudence, and 
best contrivance, and all your righteousness, would have no more influence 
to uphold you and keep 3'ou out of hell than a spider's web would liave to 
stop a falling rock. . . . There are the black clouds of God's wrath now 



218 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

haugiiig directly over your heads, full of the dreadful storm and big with 
thunder; and were it not for the restraining hand of God it would im- 
mediately burst forth upon you. The sovereign pleasure of God, for the 
present, stays his rough wind ; otherwise it would come with fury, and 
your destruction would come like a whirlwind, and you would be like the 
chaff of the summer threshing-floor. The wrath of God is like great wa- 
ters that are dammed for the present ; they increase more and more, and 
rise higher and higlier, till an outlet is given ; and the longer the stream 
is stopped, the more rapid and mighty is its course when once it is let 
loose. . . . 

Thus it will be with you that are in an unconverted state, if you continue 
in it; the infinite might and majesty and terriblencss of the omnipotent 
God shall be magnified upon you in the ineffable strength of your torments ; 
you shall be tormented in the presence of the holy angels and in the pres- 
ence of the Lamb ; and, when you shall be in this state of suffering, the 
glorious inhabitants of heaven shall go forth and look on the awful specta- 
cle, that they may see what the wrath and fierceness of the Almighty is; 
and when they have seen it they will fall down and adore that great power 
and majesty. " And it shall come to pass, that from one moon to another, 
and from one Sabbath to another, shall all fiesh come to worship before me, 
sailh tlie Lord. And they shall go forth and look upon tbe carcasses of the 
men that have transgressed against me ; for their worm shall not die, 
neither shall tiieir fire be quencJicd, and they shall be an abhorring unto ah 
flesh." 

It is everlasting wrath. It would be dreadful to suffer this fierceness 
and wrath of Almighty God one moment ; but you nmst suffer it to all 
eternity ; there will be no end to this exquisite, horrible misery ; when you 
look forward you shall see a long forever, a boundless duration before you, 
whicli will swallow up your thoughts and amaze your soul ; and you will 
absolutely despair of ever having any deliverance, any end, au}^ mitigation, 
any rest at all ; j-ou will know certainly that you must wear out long ages, 
millions of millions of ages, in wrestling and conflicting with this Almighty 
merciless vengeance ; and then, when you have so done, when so many ages 
have actually been spent by you in this manner, you will know that all is 
but a point to what remains. So that your punishment will indeed be in- 
finite. ... If we knew that there was one person, and but one, in the whole 
congregation, that was to be tlie subject of this misery, what an awful thing 
it- would be to think of! If we knew who it was, what an awful sight 
would it be to see such a person I How miglit all tlie rest of the congrega- 
tion lift up a lamentable and bitter cry over him I But alas! Instead of 
one, how many is it likely will remember this discourse in hell I And it 



Jonathan Edwards. 210 

would be a wonder if some that are now present should not be hi hell in a 
very short time, before this year is out. And it would be no wonder if 
some persons, that now sit here in some seats of this meeting-house in health, 
and quiet, and secure, should be there before to-morrow morning. 



benjamin franklin. 

Franklin's Arrival at Philadelphia. 

[From TJie Life of Benjamin Franklin, Wi-itten by JHimself.] 
I WAS in my working dress, my best clothes being to come round by sea. 
I was dirty from my journey ; my pockets were stufifed out with shirts and 
stockings, and I knew no soul nor where to look for lodging. I was fatigued 
with traveling, rowing, and want of rest ; I was very hungry ; and my 
wliole stock of cash consisted of a Dutch dollar and about a shilling in cop- 
per. Tjie latter I gave the people of the boat for my passage, who at first 
refused it, on account of my rowing ; but I insisted on their taking it, a 
man being sometimes more generous when ho has but a little money than 
when he has plenty, perhaps through fear of being thought to have but 
little. 

Then I walked up the street, gazing about, till near the market-house I 
met a boy with bread. I had made many a meal on bread, and, inquiring 
where he got it, I went immediately to the baker's he directed me to, in 
Second Street, and asked for biscuit, intending such as we had in Boston ; 
but they, it seems, were not made in Philadelphia. Then I asked for a 
three-penny loaf, and was told they had none such. So, not considering or 
knowing the difference of money, and the greater cheapness, nor the names 
of his bread, I had him give me three-penny worth of any sort. He gave 
me, accordingly, three great puffy rolls. I was surprised at the quantity, but 
took it, and, having no room in my pockets, walked off with a roll under 
each arm, and eating the other. Thus I went up Market Street as far as 
Fourth Street, passing by the door of Mr. Read, my future wife's father, 
when she, standing at the door, saw me, and thought I made, as I certainly 
did, a most awkward, ridiculous appearance. Then I turned and went 
down Chestnut Street and part of Walnut Street, eating my roll all the way 
and, coming round, found myself again at Market Street wharf, near the 
boat I came in, to which I went for a draught of the river water ; and, be- 
ing filled with one of my rolls, gave the other two to a woman and her 
child tliat came down the river in the boat with us, and were waiting to go 
farther. 



220 Initial Studies ix American Letters. 

Thus refreshed, I walked again up the street, which by this time had 
many clean-dressed people in it, who were all walking the same way. I 
joined them, and thereby was led into the great meeting-house of the Quak- 
ers near the market. I sat down among them, and, after looking 'round 
a while and hearing nothing said, being very drowsy through labor and want 
of rest the preceding night, I fell fast asleep, and continued so till the 
meeting broke up, when one was kind enough to rouse me. This was, 
therefore, the first house I was in, or slept in, in Philadelphia. 

"Walking down again toward the river, and looking in the faces of the 
people, I met a j'oung Quaker man whoso countenance I liked, and, accost- 
ing him, requested he would tell me wliere a stranger could get lodging. 
"We were near the sign of the Three Mariners. "Here," says he, "is one 
place that entertains strangers, but it is not a reputable house ; if thee wilt 
walk with me, I'll show thee a better." He brouglit me to the Crooked Bil- 
let in AVater Street. Here I got a dinner. 

Paying Too Dear for the Whistle. 

[From Correspondence with Madame Britton.] 

I AM charmed with j'our description of Paradise, and with j'oiir plan of 
living there; and I approve mucii of your conclusion, that, in the meantime, 
we should draw all the good we can from this world. In my opinion we 
might all draw more good from it than we do, and suffer less evil, if we 
would take care not to give too much for luhistles, for to me it seems that 
most of the unhappy people we meet with are become so by neglect of that 
caution. 

You ask what I mean ? You love stories, and will excuse my telling one 
of myself. 

"When I was a child of seven years old m}' friends, on a holiday, filled 
my pocket with coppers. I went directly to a shop where they sold toys 
for cliildren, and, being charmed with the sound of a tvMstle, tliat I met by 
the way in the hands of another boy, I voluntarily offered and gave all my 
money for one. I then came home, and went whistling all over the house, 
much pleased with my whistle, but disturbing all the family. Mj' brfithers 
and sisters and cousins, understanding the bargain I had made, told me I 
had given four times as much for it as it was worth; put me in mind what 
good things I miglit liave bought with the rest of the money, and laughed 
at me so much for my folly that I cried with vexation ; and the reflection 
gave me more chagrin than the lohhile gave me pleasure. 

This, however, was afterward of use to me, the impression continuing on 
my mind; so that often when I was tempted to buy some uuuecessary 



Benjamin Fkanklin. 221 

tliiijg, I said to laysL'lf, DoiHt give too much for the, whistle; and I saved my 
money. 

As I grew up, came into the world, and observed the actions of men, I 
thoiiglit I met with many, very many, who gave too iiiucli/or the ivhistk. 

Wlieu I saw one too ambitious of court favor, sacritleing his time hi at- 
tendance on levees, his repose, his liberty, his virtue, and perhaps his friends 
to attain it, I have said to myself, This man gives too much for his whislle. 

When I saw another fond of popularity, constantly employing himself in 
political bustles, neglecting his own affairs, and ruining them by that neg- 
lect, He pays, indeed, said I, too much for his whistle. . . . 

If I see one fond of appearance or fine clothes, line houses, fine furniture, 
fine equipages, all above his fortune, for which he contracts debts and ends 
his career in a prison, Alas\ say I, he has 2)aid dear, very deo.r for his whistle. . . 

In short, I conceive that a great part of the miseries of mankind are brought 
upon them by the false estimates they liave made of the value of things 
and by their giving too much for their whistles. 

Yet I ought to have charity for tliese unhappy peo[)le, when I consider 
that with all this wisdom of which I am boasting, there are certain things in 
the world so tempting, for example, the apples of King John, which hap- 
pily are not to be bought ; for if they were put to sale b_v auction I might 
very easily be lc<l to ruin myself in the purchase, and find that I had once 
more given too much for the whistk. 



PHILIP FRENEAU. 

The Indian Bueying-Gkound. 

In spite of all the learned have said, 
I still my old opinion keep : 

The posture that we give the dead 
Points out the soul's eternal sleep. 

Not so the ancients of these lands : 
The Lidian, when from life released, 

Again is seated with his friends, 
And shares again the joyous feast. 

His imaged birds and painted bowl 
And venison, for a journey dressed, 

Bespeak the nature of the soul, 
Activity that knows no rest. 



222 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

His bow for action read}'- beul, 
And arrows with a head of stone, 

Can only mean that life is spent, 
And not the tiner essence gone. 

Thou, stranger that slialt come tiiis way. 

No fraud upon the dead conunit — 
Observe tlie swelling turf and nay, 

They do not lie, but licre they sit. 

Here still a lofty rock remains. 

On which the curious eye may trace 

(Xow wasted half by wearing rains) 
The fancies of a ruder race. 

Here still an aged elm aspires, 

Beneath whose far-projecting shade 

(And which the shepherd still admires) 
The children of the forest played. 

There oft a restless Indian queen 
(Pale Sheba with her braided hair), 

And many a barbarous form is seen 
To chide the man that lingers there. 

By midnight moons, o'er moistening dews, 
In vestments for the chase arrayed, 

Tlie hunter still the deer pursues. 
The hunter and the deer — a shade I 

And long shall timorous Fancy see 
The painted chief and pointed spear, 

And Reason's self shall bow the knee 
To shadows and delusions here. 



DANIEL WEBSTER. 

The Union. 

[From the RctJly to Haijne, January 35, 1830.] 
I I'ROFESS, sir, in my career hitherto, to have kept steadily in Tiew 
the prosperity and honor of the whole country, and the preservation of 
our Federal Union. It is to that Union we owe our safety at home and 
our consideration and dignity abroad. It is to that Union that we are 
chiefly indebted for whatever makes us most proud of our country. That 
Union we reached only by the discipline of ovir virtues in the severe school 



Daniel Wkbster. 223 

of adversity. It had its origin in the necessities of disordered tinance, 
prostrate commerce, and ruined credit. Under its benign influences these 
great interests immediately awoke as from tlie dead and sprang forth with 
newness of life. Every year of its duration lias teemed with fresh proofs 
of its utilit}' and its blessings; and although our lerritorj^ has stretched out 
wider and wider and our population spread farther and farther, they have 
not outrun its protection or its benefits. It has been to us all a copious 
fountain of national, social, and personal happiness. 

I have not allowed myself, sir, to look beyond the Union to see what 
might lie hidden in the dark recess behind. I have not coolly weighed the 
chances of preserving liberty when the bonds that unite us together shall 
be broken asunder. I have not accustomed myself to hang over the preci- 
pice of disunion to see whether with my short sight I can fathom the def)th 
of the abyss below; nor could I regard him as a safe counselor in the affairs 
of this government whose thoughts should be mainly bent on considering 
not how tlie Union may be best preserved, but how tolerable might be the 
condition of the people when it should be broken up and destroj'ed. Wiiile 
the Union lasts we have high, exciting, gratifying prospects spread out 
before us, for us and our children. Beyond that I seek not to penetrate 
the veil. God grant that in my day at least that curtain may not rise! God 
grant that on my vision never may be opened what lies beyond! "When 
ray eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven, may 
I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once 
glorious Union ; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent ; on a land rent 
with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood ! Let their last 
feeble and lingering glance rather behold the gorgeous ensign of the Republic, 
now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its 
arms and trophies streaming in their original luster, not a stripe erased or 
polluted, not a single star obscured, bearing for its motto no such miseraljle 
interrogatory as " What is all this worth ? " nor those other words of 
delusion and folly, "Liberty first and Union afterward; " but every-where, 
spread all over in characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds as 
they float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the 
whole heavens, that other sentiment dear to every true American heart — 
Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable! 

South Carolina and Massachusetts. 

[From the same.] 
When I shall be found, sir, in my place here in the Senate, or elsewhere, 
to sneer at public merit because it happens to spring up beyond the little limits 
of my own State or neighborhood ; when I refuse, for any such cause, or for 



224 lij^iTiAL Studies in American Letters. 

any cause, tlie homage due to American taleut, to elevated patriotism, to sin- 
cere devotion to liberty and the count^3^; or, if I see an iiucommou eudow- 
rnent of Heaven, if I see extraordinary capacity and virtue, in any son of 
the South ; and if, moved by local prejudices or gangrened by State jeal- 
ousy, I get up here to abate the titlie of a hair from his just character and 
just fame, may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth ! 

Sir, let me recur to pleasing recollections; let me indulge in refreshing 
remembrances of the past; let me remind you that, in eavly times, no States 
cherished greater harmony, botii of principle and feeling, than Massachu- 
setts and Soutii Carolina. Would to God that harmony might again re- 
turn! Shoulder to slioulder they went through the Revolution, hand in 
hand they stood round the administration of Washington, and felt his own 
great arm lean on tiiem for support. Unkind feeling, if it exist, alienation 
and distrust are the growtli, unnatural to such soils, of false principles since 
sown. Theyare weeds, the seeds of which that same great arm never scattered. 

Mr. President, I shall enter upon no encomium of Massachusetts; she 
needs none. There she is. Behold her and judge for yourselves. There 
is her history; the world knows it by heart. The past, at least, is secure. 
There is Boston, and Concord, and Lexington, and Bunker Hill ; and there 
tiiey will remain forever. The bones of lier sons, falling in the great strug- 
gle for independence, now lie mingled witli the soil of every State from 
New England to Georgia, and there they will lie forever. And, sir, where 
American liberty raised its first voice, and where its youth was nurtured 
and sustained, there it still lives, in the strength of its manhood, and full of 
its original spirit. If discord and disunion shall wound it, if party strife 
and blind ambition shall hawk at and tear it, if folly and madness, if uneas- 
iness under salntary and necessary restraint shall sncceed in separating it 
from that Union by which alone its existence is made sure, it will stand, 
in the end, by the side of that cradle in which its infancj'' was rocked ; it 
will stretch forth its arm with whatever of vigor it may still retain, over 
the friends who gather round it; and it will fall at last, if fall it must, 
amidst the profoundost monuments of its own glory, and on the very spot 
of its origin. 



WASHINGTON IRVING. 

The Storm Ship. 

[From Bracebrid(je Hall.] 

In the golden age of the province of the New Netherlands, when under 

the sway of Wouter Van Twiller, otherwise called the Doubter, the people 

of the Manhattoes were alnrmed one sultry afternoon, just about the time of 



Wasuixgton Irving. 225 

the summer solstice, by a tremendous storm of thunder and lightning. The 
rain fell in such torrents as absolutely to spatter up and smoke along the 
ground. It seemed as if the thunder rattled and rolled over the very roofa 
of the houses; the lightning was seen to play about the Ciiurch of St. 
Nicholas, and to strive three times in vain to strike its weather-cock. Gar- 
rett Van Home's new chimney' was split almost from top to bottom ; and 
Boffue Mildeberger was struck speechless from his bald-faced mare just as 
he was riding into town. ... At length the storm abated ; the thunder sank 
into a growl, and the setting sun, breaking from under the fringed borders 
of the clouds, made the broad bosom of the bay to gleam like a sea of 
molten gold. 

The word was given from the fort that a ship was standing up the bay. . . . 
She was a stout, round, Dutch-built vessel, with high bow and poop, and 
bearing Dutch colors. The evening sun gilded her bellying canvas as she 
came riding over the long waving billows. The sentinel who had given no- 
tice of her approach declared that he first got sight of her when she was in 
the center of the bay; and that she broke suddenly on his sight, just as if 
she had come out of the bosom of the black thunder-clouds. . . . The ship 
was now repeatedly hailed, but made no reply, and, passing by the fort, 
stood on up the Hudson. A gun was brought to bear on her, and, with 
some difficulty, loaded and fired by Hans Van Pelt, the garrison not being 
expert in artillery. The shot seemed absolutely to pass through the ship, 
and to skip along the water on the other side; but no notice was taken of 
it! "What was strange, she had all her sails set, and sailed right against 
wind and tide, which were both down the river. . . . Thus she kept on, 
away up the river, lessening and lessening in the evening sunsiiine, until she 
faded from sight like a little white cloud melting away in the summer 
sky. . . . 

Messengers were dispatched to various places on the river, but they re- 
turned without any tidings — the ship had made no port. Day after day, 
week after week elapsed, but she never returned down the Hudson. As, 
however, the council seemed solicitous for intelligence they had it in abun- 
dance. The captains of the sloops seldom arrived without bringing some 
report of having seen the strange ship at different parts of the river — - 
sometimes near the Palisades, sometimes off Croton Point, and sometimes 
in the Highlands ; but she never was reported as having been seen above 
the Highlands. The crews of tlie sloops, it is true, gcnernlly differed among 
themselves in their accounts of these apparitions ; but that may have arisen 
from the uncertain situations in which they saw her. Sometimes it was by 
the flashes of the thunder-storm lighting up a pitchy night, and giving 
glimpses of her careering across Tappan Zee or the wide waste of Haver- 
15 



226 l^^iTiAL Studies in American Letters. 

straw Bay. At one moment she would appear close upon them, as if likely 
to run them down, and would throw them into great bustle and alarm ; but 
the next flash would show her far o£E, always sailing against the wind. 
Sometimes, in quiet moonlight nights, she would be seen under some high 
bluflf of the Highlands, all in deep shadow, excepting her top-sails glitter- 
ing in the moonbeams ; by the time, however, that the voyagers reached 
the place no ship was to be seen ; and when tliey had passed on for some 
distance and looked back, behold! there she was again with her top-sails in 
the moonshine! Her appearance was always just after or just in the midst 
of unruly weather ; and she was known among the skippers and voyagers 
of the Hudson by the name of " The Storm Ship." 

These reports perplexed the governor and his council more than ever ; 
and it would be useless to repeat the conjectures and opinions uttered on 
the subject. Some quoted cases in point of ships seen off the coast of 
New England navigated by witches and goblins. Old Hans Van Pelt, who 
had been more than once to the Dutch Colony at the Cape of Good Hope, 
insisted that this must be the Flying Dutchman which had so long haunted 
Table Bay, but being unable to make port had now sought another harbor. 
Others suggested that il it really was a supernatural apparition, as there 
was every natural reason to believe, it might be Hendrik Hudson and his 
crew of the Half-Moon, who, it was well known, had once run aground in 
the upper part of the river in seeking a north-west passage to China. This 
opinion had very little weight with the governor, but it passed current out 
of doors ; for indeed it had always been reported that Hendrik Hudson and 
his crew haunted the Kaatskill Mountains ; and it appeared very reasonaljle 
to suppose that his ship might infest the river where the enterprise was 
baffled, or that it might bear the shadowy crew to their periodical revels- in 
the mountain. . . . 

People who live along the river insist that they sometimes see her in 
summer moonlight, and that in a deep stiU midnight they have heard the 
chant of her crew, as if heaving the lead ; but sights and sounds are so 
deceptive along the mountainous shores, and about the wide bays and long 
reaches of this great river, that T confess I have very strong doubts upon 
tlie subject. It is certain, nevertheless, that strange things have been seen 
in these Highlands in storms, which are considered as connected with the 
old story of the ship. The captains of the river craft talk of a little bulb- 
ous-bottomed Dutch goblin, in trunk hose and sugar-loafed hat, with a 
speaking-trumpet in his hand, which, they say, keeps about the Dunderberg. 
Tliey declare that they have heard him, in stormy weather, in the midst of 
the turmoil, giving orders in Low Dulcli for the piping up of a fresh gust of 
wind or the rattling off of another thunder-clap; that sometimes he has been 



Washington Irving. 227 

seen surrounded by a crew of little imps in broad breeches and short doub- 
lets, tumbling head-over-heels in the rack and mist, and playing a tliousand 
ojambols in the air, or buzzing like a swarm of tlies about Anthony's Nose : 
and that, at such times, the hurry-scurry of the storm was always greatest. 
One time a sloop, in passing by the Duuderberg, was overtaken by a tliuu- 
der-gust that came scouring round the mountain, and seemed to burst just 
over the vessel. Though tight and well ballasted she labored dreadfully, 
and the water came over the gunwale. All the crew were amazed when it 
was discovered that there was a little while sugar-loaf hat ou the mast- 
head, known at once to be the hat of the Herr of the Duuderberg. No- 
body, however, dared to climb to the mast-head and get rid of this terrible 
hat. The sloop continued laboring and rocking, as if she would have rolled 
licr mast overboard, and seemed in continual danger either of upsetting or 
of nuiiiing on shore. In this way she drove quite througli the Highlands, 
until she had passed PoUopol's Island, where, it is said, the jurisdiction of 
the Duuderberg potentate ceases. No sooner had she passed this bourn 
than the little hat spun up into the air like a top, whirled up all the clouds 
into a vortex, and hurried them back to tlie summit of the Duuderberg, 
while the sloop righted herself and sailed on as quietly as if in a mill-poud. 
Nothing saved her from utter wreck but the fortunate circumstance of hav- 
ing a horse-shoe nailed against the mast — a wise precaution against evil 
spirits, since adopted by all the Dutch captains that navigate this haunted 
river. 



james fenimore cooper. 
The Rendezvous. 

[From The Deerslancr.] 

In the position in which the ark had now got, the castle was concealed 
from view by the projection of a point, as, indeed, was the northern extrem- 
ity of the lake itself. A respectable mountain, forest-clad, and rounded like 
all the rest, limited the view in lljat direction, stretching immediately across 
the whole of the fair scene,' with the exception of a deep bay that passed its 
western end, lengthening the basiti for more than a mile. The manner in 
which the water flowed out of the lake, beneath the leafy arches of the 
trees that lined the sides of the stream, has already been mentioned, and it 
has also been said tliat the rock, which was a favorite place of rendezvous 
throughout all that region, and vvliere Deerslayer now expected to meet his 

* Otsego Lake. 



228 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

friend, stood near this outlet and no great distance from the shore; It was 
a large isolated stone that rested on the bottom of the lake, apparently left 
there when the waters tore away the earth from around it, in forcing for 
themselves a passage down the river, and which had obtained its shape 
from the action of the elements during the slow progress of centuries. The 
height of this rock could scarcely equal six feet, and, as has been said, its shape 
was not unlike that which is usually given to bee-hives or to a hay-cock. 
The latter, indeed, gives the best idea, not oul_vof its form, but of its dimen- 
sions. It stood, and still stands, for we are writing of real scones, within 
fifty feet of the bank, and in water that was only two feet in depth, though 
there were seasons in which its rounded apex, if such a term can properly 
be used, was covered bj' the lake. Man}' of the trees stretched so far for- 
ward as almost to blend the rock with the shore, when seen froifi a little 
distance; and one tall pine in particular overhung it in a way to form a 
noble and appropriate canopy to a seat that had held many a forest chief- 
tain, during the long succession of ages in which America and all it 
contained existed apart in mysterious solitude, a world by itself, equally 
without a familiar history and without an origin that the annals of man 
can catch. 

"When distant some two or three hundred feet from the shore Deerslayer 
took in his sail, and he dropped his grapnel as soon as he found the ark 
had drifted in a line that was directlj'- to windward of the rock. The 
motion of the scow was then checked, when it was brought head to wind 
by the action of the breeze. As soon as this was done Deerslayer "paid 
out line," and suffered the vessel to " set down " upon the rock as fast as 
the liglit air would force it to leeward. Floating entirely on the surface, 
this was soon affected, and the young man checked the drift when he was 
told that the stern of the scow was within fillcen or eighteen feet of the de- 
sired spot. 

In executing this maneuver, Deerslayer had proceeded promptly; for 
while he did not in the least doubt that he was botli watched and followed 
by the foe, he believed he had distracted their movements by the apparent 
uncertainty of his own, and he knew they could have no means of ascer- 
taining that the rock was his aim, unles;^, indeed, one of the prisoners had be- 
trayed him — a chance so improbable in itself as to give him no concern. Not- 
withstanding the celerity and decision of his movements, he did not, however, 
venture so near the shore without taking due precautions to effect a re- 
treat in the event of its becoming necessar3\ He held the line in his hand, 
and Judith was stationed at a loop on the side of the cibin next the shore, 
where she could watch the beach and the rocks and give timely notice of 
the approach of either friend or foe. Hetty was also placed on watch, but 



James Fenimore Cooper. 229 

it was to keep tlie trees overliead in view, lest some enemy might ascend 
one, and, by completely commanding the interior of the scow, render the 
defenses of the hnt or cabin nseless. 

The sun had disappeared from the lake and valley when Deerslayer 
checked the ark in the manner mentioned. Still it wanted a few minutes 
to the true sunset, and he knew Indian punctuality too well to anticipate any 
nnmanl}' haste in his friend. The great question was, whether, surrounded 
by enemies as he was known to be, he had escaped their toilo. The occur- 
rences of the last twenty-four hoi:rs must be a secret to him, and, like him- 
self, Chingachgcjk was yet young on a war-path. It was true he came 
prepared to encounter the party that withheld his promised bride, but he 
had no means of ascertaining tlio extent of the danger he ran or the precise 
positions occupied by either friends or foes. In a word, tlie trained sagacity 
and untiring caution of an Indian were all he had to rely on amid the crit- 
ical risks he unavoidably ran. 

" Is the rock empty, Juditli ? " inquired Deerslayer, as soon as he had 
checked the drift of the ark, deeming it imprudont to venture unnecessarily 
near. " Is any thing to be seen of the Delaware chief? " 

"Nothing, Decrshwer. Neither rock, shore, tree, nor lake seems to have 
ever held a human form." 

" Keep close, Judith — keep close, Hetty — a rifle has a prying eye, a nim- 
ble foot, and a desperate fatal tongue. Keep close, then, but keep up 
actyve looks, and be on the alart. 'Twould grieve me to the heart did any 
harm befall either of you." 

"And you, Deerslayer!" exclaimed Judith, turning her handsome face 
from the loop, to bestow a gracious and grateful look on the young man ; 
"do you 'keep close ' and have a proper care that the savages do not catch a 
glimpse of you! A bullet might be as fatal to you as to one of us, and 
the blow that j^ou felt would be felt by all." 

" No fear of me, Judith — no fear of me, my good gal. Do not look this-a- 
way, although you look so pleasant and comely, but keep your eyes on the 
rock and the sliore and the — " 

Deerslayer was interrupted by a slight exclamation from the girl, who. 
in obedience to his hurried gestures, as much as in obedience to his words, 
had immediately bent her looks again in the opposite direction. 

" What is't? — what is't, Juditli ? " he hastily demanded. " Is any thing 
to be seen?" 

"There is a man on the rock! — an Indian warrior in his paint, and 
armed I " 

"Where does he wear his hawk's feather ?" eagerly added Deerslayer, 
relaxing his hold of the line, in readiness to drift nearer to the place 



230 Initial Studies tn American Letters. 

of rendezvous. " Is it fast to the warlock, or does lie carry it above the 
left ear?" 

'"Tis as you say, above the left ear; he smiles, too, and mutters the word 
'Mohican.'" 

" God be praised, 'tis the Sarpent at last 1 " exclaimed the young man, 
sudoriiig the line to slip through his hands until, hearing a light bound in 
the other end of the craft, lie instantly checked the rope and began to haul it 
in again under the assurance that his object was effected. 

At that moment the door of the cabin was opened hastily, and a warrior 
darting through the little room stood at Deerslayer's side, simply uttering 
the exclamation " Hugh 1 " At the next instant Judith and Hetty shriekcu, 
and the air was filled with the yell of twenty savages, who came leaping 
through the branches down the bank, some actually falling headlong into 
the water in their haste. 

" Pull, Deerslayer," cried Judith, hastily barring the door, in order to pre- 
vent an inroad by the passage through which the Delaware had just entered ; 
'' pull for life and death — the lake is full of savages wading after us 1 " 

The young men —for Ciiingachgook immediately came to his friend's assist- 
ance — needed no second bidding, but they applied tliemselves to their task 
in a way that showed how urgent they deemed the occasion. The great 
difficulty was in suddenly overcoming the vis inertuv of so large a mass; for, 
once in motion, it was easy to cause the scow to skim the water with all 
the necessary speed. 

"Pull, Deerslayer, for heaven's sake!" cried Judith, again at the loop. 
" These wretches rush into the water like hounds following their prey 1 Ah ! 
The scow moves! and now the water deepens to the armpits of the fore- 
most ; still they rush forward and will seize the ark 1 " 

A slight scream and then a joyous laugh followed from the girl; the first 
produced by a desperate effort of their pursuers, and the last by its failure; 
the scow, which had now got fairly in motion, gliding ahead into deep 
water with a velocity that set the designs of their enemies at naught. As 
the two men were prevented by the position of the cabin from seeing what 
passed astern, they were compelled to inquire of the girls into the state of 
the chase. 

"What now, Judith?— what next? Do the Mingoes still follow, or are 
we quit of 'em for the present?" demanded Deerslayer when he felt the 
rope yielding, as if tlie scow was going fast ahead, and heard the scream 
and the laugh of the girl almost in the same breath. 

'' They have vanished ! — one, the last, is just burying himself in the bushes 
of the bank — there! he has disappeared iu the shadows of the treesi You 
have got your friend and we are all safe 1 " 



WlTiLIAAI ClTLLEN- BrYANT. 231 

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 

To A Waterfowl. 

WuiTHER, 'midst falling dew, 

"While glow the heavens with the last steps of day, 
Far through their rosy depths dost thou pursue 

Thy solitary way ? 

Yainly the fowler's eye 

Might mark thy distant flight to do thee wrong, 
As, darkly seen against the crimson sky, 

Thy figure floats along. 

Seek'st thou the plashy brink 

Of weedy lake or marge of river wide, 
Or where the rocking billows rise and sink 

Ol the chafed ocean side? 

There is a power whose care 

Teaches thy way along that pathless coast— 
The desert and illimitable air — 

Lone wandering but not lost. 

All day thy wings have fanned, 

At that far height, the cold, thin atmosphere^ 
Yet stoop not, weary, to the welcome land, 

Though the dark night is near. 

And soon that toil shall end; 

Soon shalt thou find a summer home and rest. 
And scream among thy fellows ; reeds shall bend 

Soon o'er thy sheltered nest. 

Thou'rt gone, the abyss of heaven 

Hath swallowed up thy form ; yet on my heart 

Deeply hath sunk the lesson thou hast given, 
And shall not soon depart. 

He who, from zone to zone, 

Guides througli the boundless sky thy ccrtaia flight, 
In the long way tliat I must tread alone, 

"Will lead my steps aright. 



232 INITIAL Studies in American Letters. 

The Deatu of the Flowers. 

The melancholy days are come, 

The saddest of the year, 
Of wailing winds and naked woods, 

And meadows brown and sere. 
Heaped in the hollows of the grove, 

Tlie autumn leaves lie dead ; 
Tiiey rustle to the eddying gust. 

And to the rabbit's tread. 
The robin and the wren are flown, 

And from the shrubs the jay, 
And from the wood-top calls the crow 

Through all the gloomy day. 

Whore are the flowers, the fair young flowers. 

That lately sprang and stood 
In brighter liglit and softer airs, 

A beauteous sisterhood ? 
Alas ! they all are in their graves ; 

Tlie gentle race of flowers 
Are lying in their lowly beds 

"With the fair and good of ours. 
The rain is falling where they lie, 

But the cold November rain 
Calls not, from out the gloomy earth. 

The lovely ones again. 

The wind-flower and the violet, 

They perished long ago, 
And the brier-rose and the orchis died 

Amid the summer glow ; 
But on the hill the golden-rod, 

And the aster in the wood, 
And the yellow sun-flower by the brook 

In autumn beauty stood. 
Till fell the frost from the clear cold heaven, 

As falls the plague on men, 
And the brightness of their smile was gone 

From upland, glade, and glen. 



WiLiJAjr Cui.LEX Bryant. 233 

And now when comes the calm, mild day, 

As still sucii days will come, 
To call the squirrel and the bee 

From out their winter home ; 
When the sound of dropping nuts is heard, 

Tliough all the trees are still, 
And twinkle in the smoky light 

The waters of the rill. 
The south wind searches for the flowers 

Whose fragrance late he bore, 
And sighs to find them in the wood 

And by the stream no more. 

And tlien I think of one who in 

Her youthful beauty died. 
The fair meek blossom that grew up 

And faded by my side ; 
In the cold, moist earth wo laid her, 

When the forest cast the leaf, 
And we wept that one so lovely 

Should have a life so brief. 
Yet not unmeet it was that one, 

Like that young friend of ours, 
So gentle and so beautiful. 

Should perish with the flowers. 



Tub Universal Tomb. 

LFrom Thanatopsis.] 

ST ET not to thine eternal resting-place 

Shalt thou retire alone, nor could'st thou wish 

Couch more magnificent. Thou shalt lie down 

With patriarchs of the infant world — with kings. 

The powerful of the earth — the wise, the good, 

Fair forms, and hoary seers of ages past, 

All in one mighty sepulcher. The hills, 

Rock-ribb'd and ancient as the sim, — the vales 

Stretching in pensive quietness between ; 

Tlie venerable woods — rivers that move 

In majesty, and the complaining brooks 

That make the meadows green ; and, poured round all, 



234 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

Old Ocean's gray and melancholy waste, — 
Are but the solemn decorations all 
Of the great tomb of man. The golden sun, 
The planets, all the infinite host of heaven, 
Are shining on the sad abodes of death, 
Through the still lapse of ages. All that tread 
The globe are but a handful to the tribes 
That slumber in its bosom. Take the wings 
Of morning, traverse Barca's desert sands, 
Or lose thyself in the continuous woods 
Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound 
Save his own dashings — yet the dead are there : 
And millions in those solitudes, since lirst 
The flight of years began, have laid them down 
In their last sleep — the dead reign there alone. 

So live, that when thy summons comes to join 
The innumerable caravan, which moves 
To that mysterious realm, where each shall lake 
His chamber in the silent halls of death, 
Tlion go not, like the quarry-slave at night. 
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed 
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave, 
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch 
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams. 



RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 

Nature's Ministry of Beauty. 

[From Nature.] 

To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not 
see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illumi- 
nates ouly the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the 
child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still 
truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even 
into the era of manhood. Ills intercourse with heaven and earth becomes 
part of his daily food. In the presence of nature a wild deliglit runs through 
the man, in spite of real sorrows. Nature says, He is my creature, and 
mauger all his impertinent griefs, be shall be glad with me. Not the suu 



Ralph Waldo Eaikkson. 235 

or tliesii miner alone, but every hour and season yields its tribute of delight; 
lor every hour and change corresponds to and authorizes a different state 
of the mind, from breathless noon to grimmest midniglit. Nature is a 
setting that fits equally well a comic or a mourning piece. In good health, 
the air is a cordial of incredible virtue. Crossing a bare common, m snow 
puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts 
any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilara- 
tion. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods, too, a man casts off his 
years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life is always 
a child. In the woods is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of 
God a decorum and sanctity reigns, a perennial festival is dressed, and the 
guest sees not how he should tire of them m a thousand years. In the 
woods we return to reason and Hiith. There I feel that nothing can befall 
me in life — no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me ray eyes), which nature 
cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground — my head bathed by the 
blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space — all mean egotism vanishes, I 
become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the 
Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The 
name of the nearest friend sounds there foreign and accidental: to be 
brothers, to be acquaintances — master or servant, is then a trifle and a dis- 
turbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the 
wilderness I find something more dear and connate than in streets or vil- 
lages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the 
horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature. 

The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the sugges- 
tion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone 
and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. Tlie waving of tlie 
boughs in the storm is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and 
yet is not unknown. . . . 

I see the spectacle of morning from the liill-top over against my house, 
from daybreak to sunrise, with emotions which an angel might share. Tlie 
long slender bars of cloud float like fishes in the sea of crimson light. From 
the earth, as a shore, I look out into that silent sea. I seem to partake its 
rapid transformations: the active enchantment reaches my dust, and I di- 
late and conspire with the morning wind. How does Nature deify us with 
a few and cheap elements I Give me liealth and a day, and I will make the 
pomp of emperors ridiculous. The dawn is my Assyria ; the sunset and 
moonrise my Paphos, and unimaginable realms of faerie; broad noon shall 
be my England of the senses and the understanding; the night shall be 
my Germany of mystic philosophy and dreams. 

Not less excellent, except for our less susceptibility io the afternoon, 



236 Initial Stuptes ttst Amkrican" Letters. 

was the charm, last evening, of a January sunset. Tlie western clouds di- 
vided and subdivided themselves into pink flakes modulated with tints of 
unspeakable softness ; and the air had so much life and sweetness that 
it was a pain to come within doors. What was it that Nature would 
say? Was there no meaning in the live repose of the valley behind the 
mill, and which Homer or Shakespeare could not re-forin for me in 
words? The leafless trees become spires of flame in the sunset, with 
the blue east for their background, and the stars of the dead calices of 
flowers, and every withered stem and stubble ruined with frost, con- 
tribute something to the mute music. 

Idealism. 

[From the same.] 

To the senses and the unrenewed understanding belongs" a sort of instinct- 
ive belief in the absolute existence of nature. In their view man and 
nature are iudissolnbly joined. Things are ultimates, and they never look 
beyond their sphere. The presence of Reason mars this faith. . . . Natiu-e 
is made to conspire with spirit to emancipate us. Certain mechanical 
changes, a small alteration in our local position, apprises ns of a dualism. 
We are strangely affected by seeing the shore from a moving ship, from a 
balloon, or through tlie tints of an uiuisual sky. The least change in our 
point of view gives the whole world a pictorial air. A man who seldom 
rides needs only to get into a coach and traverse his own town, to turn the 
street into a puppet-show. The men, the women — talking, running, barter- 
ing, fighting — the earnest mechanic, the lounger, the beggar, the boys, the 
dogs are unrealized at once, or at least wholl}^ detached from all relation to 
the observer, and seen as apparent, not substantial, beings. What new 
thoughts are suggested by seeing a face of country quite familiar, in the 
rapid movement of the railwaj- car 1 Nay, the most wonted objects (make 
a very slight change in the point of vision) please us most. In a 
camera obscura the butcher's cart and the figure of one of our own family 
amuse us. So a portrait of a well-known face gratifies us. Turn the 
eyes upside down, by looking at the landscape through your legs, and how 
agreeable is the picture, though you have seen it any time these twenty 
years 1 

In these cases, by mechanical means, is suggested the difference between 
the observer and the spectacle, between the man and nature. Hence arises 
a pleasure mixed with awe; I may say, a low degree of the sublime is felt 
from the fact, probably, that man is hereby apprised, that whilst the world 
is a spectacle, something in himself is stable. 



Ralph Waldo Emerson. 231 

The Rhodoka,' 

In May, when wca-winds pierced our solitudes, 

I found the fresh Rhodora, in Uie woods, 

Spre;iding- its leafless blooms in a damp nook, 

To (ilease the desert and the sluggish brook. 

The purple petals, fallen in tliopool. 

Made the black water with their beauty gay ; 

Here might the red bird come his plumes to cool. 

And court the (lower that clieapens his array. 

Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why 

This charm is wasted on the earth and sky. 

Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing, 

Then Beauty is its own excuse for being: 

Why thou wert there, rival of the rose, 

I never tliou.Liht to ask, I never knew: 

But, iu my simple ignorance, suppose 

The self-same power that brought me there brought you. 

Hymk. 

[.Sung at the completion of the Concord Monument, April 19, 18:36.] 

By the nide bridge that arched the flood. 

Their Hag to April's breeze unfurled, 
Here once the embattled farmers stood. 

And tired the shot heard round the world. 

The foe long since iu silence slept; 

Alike the conqueror silent sleeps; 
And time the ruined bridge has swept 

Down the dark stream which seaward creeps. 

On this green bank, by this soft stream. 

We set to-day a votive stone ; 
Tiiat memory may their deed redeem. 

When, like our sires, our sons are gone. 

Spirit, that made those lieroes dare 

To die, and leave their children free, 
Bid time and nature gently spare 

The shaft we raise to them and thee. 

1 On beiuii asked. Whence is the flower? 



238 I^iiTiAL Studies in American Letters. 

NATHANIEL HA"W"THOBNE. 

The Haunted Mind. 

What a singular niomeut is the first one, when you liavo hardly begun to 
recollect yourself, after starting from midnight slumber I By unclosing your 
eyes so suddeidy you seem to liave surprised the personages of your dream 
in full convocalioii round your bed and catch one broad glance at them be- 
fore they can flit into obscurity. Or, to vary the metaphor, you find your- 
self, for a single instant, wide awake in that realm of illusions whither sleep 
has been the passport, and behold its ghostly inhabitants and wondrous 
scenery with a perception of their strangeness such as you never altain 
while the dream is undisturbed. The distant sound of a church clock is 
borne faintly on the wind. You question with yourself, half seriously, 
whetlier it has stolen to your waking ear from some gray tower that stood 
within tlie precincts of your dream. While yet in suspense, another clock 
Hings its heavy clang over the slumbering town with so full and distinct a 
sound, and such a long murmur In the neighboring air, that you are certain 
it must proceed from the steeple at the nearest corner. You count the 
strokes — one — two, and there they cease, with a booming sound, like the 
gathering of a third stroke within the bell. 

If you could choose an hour of wakefulness out of the whole night it 
would be tliis. Since your sober bed-time, at eleven, you have had rest 
enough to take off the pressure of yesterday's fatigue ; while before you 
till tlie sun comes from "far Cathay" to brighten your window there is 
almost the space of a summer night ; one hour to be spent in thought, with 
the mind's eye half shut, and two in pleasant dreams, and two in that 
strangest of enjoyments, the forgetfulness alike of Joy and woe. The 
moment of rising belongs to another period of time, and appears so distant 
that the plunge out of a warm bed into tlic frosty air cannot yet be anticipated 
with dismay. Yesterday has already vanished among the shadows of the 
past; to-morrow has not yet emerged from the future. You liave found an 
intermediate space, where the business of life does Qot intrude, where the 
passing moment lingers and becomes truly tlie present; a spot wliere 
Father Time, when he thinks nobody is watcliing him, sits down by the 
way-side to take breath. tliat he would fall asleep and let mortals live on 
without growing older! 

Hitherto you have lain perfectly still, because the slightest motion would 
dissipate the fragments of your slumber. Now, being irrevocably awake, 
you peep through tlie half-drawn window-curtain and observe that the 
glass is ornamented with fiiuciful devices in frost-work, and that each pane 



Nathaniel Hawthorne. 239 

presents something like a frozen dream. There will be time enough to 
trace out the analogy while waiting the summons to breakfast. Scon 
through the clear portion of the glass, where the silvery mountain peaks 
of the frost scenery do not ascend, the most conspicuous object is the 
steeple, the white spire of which directs you to the wintry luster of the 
firmament. You maj^ almost distinguish the figures on the clock tliat has 
just tolled the hour. Such a frosty sky, and the snow-covered roofs, and 
the long vista of the frozen street, all white, and the distant water hardtncd 
into rock, might make j'ou shiver, even under four blankets and a woolen 
comforter. Yet look at that one glorious star ! Its beams are distinguish- 
able from all the rest, and actually cast the shadow of the casement on the 
bed with a radiance of deeper hue than moonlight, though not so accurate 
an outline. 

You sink down and mufHe your head in the clothes, shivering all the 
while, but less from bodily chill than the bare idea of a polar atmosphere. 
It is too cold even for the thoughts to venture abroad. You speculate on 
the luxury of wearing out a whole existence in bed, hke an oyster in its 
shell, content with the sluggish ecstasy of inaction, and drowsily conscious 
of nothing but delicious warmth, such as you now feel again. Ah I that 
idea has brought a hideous one in its train. You think how the dead are 
lying in their cold shrouds and narrow coffins through the drear winter of 
the grave, and cannot persuade your fiuicy that they neither shrink nor 
shiver when the snow is drifting over their little hillocks and the bitter 
blast howls against the door of the tomb. Tiiat gloomy thought will 
collect a gloomy multitude and throw its complexion over your wake- 
ful hour. 

In the depths of every heart there is a tomb and a dungeon, though the 
lights, the music, and revelry above may cause us to forget their existence, 
and the buried ones or prisoners whom they hide. But sometimes, and 
oftenest at midnight, these dark receptacles are flung wide open. In an 
hour like this, when the mind has a passive sensibility, but no active 
strength ; when the imagination is a mirror, imparting vividness to all ideas 
without the power of selecting or controlling them, then pray that your 
griefs may slumber and the brotherhood of remorse not break their cliain. 
It is too late I A funeral train comes gliding by your bed, in which Passion 
and Feeling assume bodily shape and things of the mind become dim 
specters to the eye. There is your earliest Sorrow, a pale young mourner, 
wearing a sister's likeness to first love, sadly beautiful, witli a hallowed 
sweetness in her melancholy features and grace in the flow of her sable robe. 
Next appears a shade of ruined loveliness, with dust among her golden hair 
and her bright garments all faded and defaced, stealing from your glance 



240 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

with drooping head, as fearful of roproacli; she was your fondest Tlope, but 
a dehisive one ; so call her Disappointment now. A sterner form succeeds, 
■with a brow of wrinkles, a look and gesture of iron authority ; there is no 
name for liira unless it be Fatality, an emblem of the evil influence that 
rules your fortunes ; a demon to whom you subjected yourself by some error 
at the outset of life, and were bound his slave forever, by once obeying him. 
See I those fiendish lineaments graven on the darkness, the writhed lip of 
scorn, the mockery of that living eye, the pointed finger, touching the sore 
place in your heart! Do you remember any act of enormous folly, at which 
you would blush, even in the remotest cavern of the earth? Then recognize 
your Shame. 

Pass, wretched band I Well for the wakeful one if, riotously miserable, 
a fiercer tribe do not surround him, the devils of a guilty heart, that holds 
its liell within itself. What if Remorse should assume the features of an 
injured friend? What if the fiend should come in woman's garments, with 
a pale beauty amid sin and desolation, and lie down by your side? What 
if he sliould stand at your bed's foot, in the lil^eness of a corpse, with a 
bloody stain upon the shroud? Sufficient without such guilt is this night- 
mare of the soul; this heavy, heavy sinking of the spirits; tliis wintry 
gloom about the heart ; this indistinct horror of the mind, blending itself 
with the darkness of the chamber. . . . Now comes the peal of the distant 
clock, with fainter and fainter strokes as you plunge farther into the wil- 
derness of sleep. It is the knell of a temporary death. Your spirit has de- 
parted, and strays like a free citizen, among the people of a shadowy world, 
beholding strange sights, yet without wonder or dismay. So calm, perhaps, 
will be the final change; so undisturbed, as if among familiar things, the 
entrance of the soul to its eternal home ! 



HENRY AATADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. 

The Beleaguered City. 

I HAVE read, in some old marvelous tale, 

Some legend strange and vague, 
That a midnight host of specters pale 

Beleaguered the walls of Prngue. 

Beside the Moldau's rushing stream, 

With the wan moon overhead, 
There stood, as in an awful dream, 

The arm}'' of the dead. 



Henry Wadswoktii Loxgfellow. 241 

White as a sea-fog, landward bound, 

The spectral camp was seen, 
And, with a sorrowful deep sound, 

The river flowed between. 



No other voice nor sound was tliere, 
No drum, nor sentry's pace ; 

The mist-like banners clasped the air, 
As clouds with clouds embrace. 



But when the old cathedral bell 
Proclaimed the morning prayer, 

The white pavilions rose and fell 
On the alarmed air. 

Down the broad valley fast and far 

The troubled army fled; 
Up rose the glorious morning star, 

The ghastly host was dead. 

I have read in the marvelous heart of man, 
That strange and mystic scroll, 

That an army of phantoms vast and wan 
Beleaguer the human soul. 

Encamped beside Life's rushing stream, 

In Fancy's misty light, 
Gigantic shapes and shadows gleam 

Portentous through the night. 

Upon its midnight battle-ground 

The spectral camp is seen. 
And, with a sorrowful deep soimd. 

Flows the River of Life between. 

No other voice nor sound is there, 

In the army of the grave ; 
No other challenge breaks the air, 

But the rushing of life's wave. 



10 



242 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

And wlieu the solemu and deep church-bell 

Entreats the soul to pray, 
The midnight phantoms feel the spell, 

The shadows sweep away. 

Down the broad Vale of Tears afar 

The spectral camp is fled ; 
Faith sliineth as a morning star, 

Our ghastly fears are dead. 

The Occultation of Orion. 

I SAW, as in a dream sublime, 
The balance in tlie hand of Time. 
O'er East and West its beam impended; 
And day, with all its hours of light, 
Was slowly sinking out of sight. 
While, opposite, the scale of night 
Silently with the stars ascended. 

Like the astrologers of eld. 

In that bright vision I beheld 

Greater and deeper mysteries. 

I saw, with its celestial keys, 

Its chords of air, its frets of fire, 

The Samian's great ^olian lyre. 

Rising through all its sevenfold bars. 

From earth unto the fixed stars. 

And through the dewy atmosphere. 

Not only could I see, but hear. 

Its wondrous and harmonious strings, 

In sweet vibration, sphere by sphere, 

From Dian's circle light and near. 

Onward to vaster and wider rings, 

Where, chanting through his beard of snows, 

Majestic, mournful Saturn goes. 

And down the sunless realms of space 

Reverberates the tbimder of his bass. 

Beneath the sky's triumphal arch 
This music sounded like a march. 
And witli its chorus seemed to be 
Preluding some great tragedy. 



Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 243 

Sirius was rising in the east; 
And, slow ascending one by one, 
Tiie kindling constellations shone. 
Begirt with many a blazing star, 
Stood the great giant, vVlgebar, 
Orion, hunter of the beast! 
His sword hung gleaming by his side, 
And, on his arm, the lion's hide 
Scattered across the midnight air 
The golden radiance of its hair. 

Tiie moon was pallid, but not faint; 
And beautiful as some fair saint, 
Serenely moving on her way 
In hours of trial and dismay. 
As if she heard the voice of God, 
Unharmed with naked feet slie trod 
Upon the hot and burning stars. 
As on the glowing coals and bars 
That were to prove her strength, and try 
Her holiness and her purity. 

Thus moving on, with silent pace. 

And triumph in her sweet, pale face. 

She readied the station of Orion. 

Aghast he stood in strange alarm ! 

And suddenly from his outstretched arm 

Down fell the red skin of the lion 

Into the river at his feet. 

His mighty club no longer beat 

The forehead of tiie bull ; but ho 

Reeled as of yore beside the sea, 

When, blinded by CEnopion, 

He sought the blacksmith at his forge, 

And, climbing up the mountain gorge, 

Fi.xed his blank eyes upon the sun, 

Then through the silence overhead. 

An angel with a trumpet said, 

" Forever more, forever more. 

The reign of violence is o'er." 

And, like an mstrument tliat flings 

Its music on another's strings, 



244 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

The trumpet of the augel cast 

Upon the heavenly lyre its blast, 

And on from sphere to sphere the words 

Re-echoed down the burning chords, — 

" For evermore, for evermore, 

The reign of violence is o'er I " 

^ Dante. 

Tuscan, that wanderest through the realms of gloom, 
"With thoughtful pace, and sad, majestic eyes, 
Stern thoughts and awful from thy thoughts arise, 
Like Farinata from his fierj' tomb. 
Thy sacred song is like the trump of doom; 
Yet in thy heart what human sympathies. 
What soft compassion glows, as in the skies 
The tender stars their clouded lamps relume I 
Methinks I see thee stand, with pallid cheeks, 

By Fra Hilario in his diocese, 
As up the convent wall, in golden streaks. 

The ascending sunbeams mark the day's decrease. 
And, as he asks what there the stranger seeks. 
Thy voice along the cloister whispers, "Peace! " 



JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. 

Randolph of Roanoke. 

Mother Earth I upon thy lap 

Thy weary ones receiving. 
And o'er them, silentas a dream. 

Thy grassy mantle weaving. 
Fold softly in thy long embrace 

That heart so worn and broken, 
And cool its pulse of fire beneath 

Thy shadows old and oaken. 

Shut out from him the bitter word 
And serpent hiss of scorning ; 

Nor let the storms of yesterday 
Disturb his quiet morning. 



John Green^leaf Whittier. 245 

Breathe over liiiu lurgetfuluess 

Of all save deeds of kindness, 
And, save to smiles of grateful eyes, 

Press down his lids in blindness. 

There, where with living ear and eye, 

He heard Potomac's flowing, 
And, through his tall ancestral trees 

Saw autumn's sunset glowing, 
He sleeps — still looking to the West, 

Beneath the dark wood shadow, 
As if he still would see the sun 

Sink down on wave and meadow. 

Bard, Sage, and Tribune — in himself 

All moods of mind contrasting — 
The tenderest wail of liuman woe. 

The scorn like lightning blasting; 
The pathos which from rival eyes 

Unwilling tears could summon. 
The stinging taunt, the fiery burst 

Of hatred scarcely human 1 

Mirth, sparkling like a diamond shower. 

From lips of life-long sadness ; 
Clear picturings of majestic thought 

Upon a ground of madness ; 
And over all Romance and Song 

A classic beauty throwing, 
And laureled Clio at his side 

Her storied pages showing. 

All parties feared him : each iu tura 

Beheld its schemes disjointed, 
As right or left his fatal glance 

And spectral finger pointed. 
Sworn foe of cant, he smote it down 

With trenchant wit unsparing. 
And, mocking, rent with ruthless hand 

The robe Pretense was wearing. 



24G Initial Studies in American Letters. 

Too honest or too proud to feign 

A love he never cherished, 
Bej-ond Virginia's border hue 

His patriotism perished. 
"While others hailed in distant skies 

Our eagle's duskj' pinion, 
He only saw the mountain bird 

Stoop o'er his Old Dominion. 

Still through each change of fortune strange, 

Racked nerve, and brain all burning. 
His loving faith in mother-land 

Knew never shade of turning ; 
By Britain's lakes, by Neva's wave, 

Wliatever sky was o'er him, 
He heard her rivers' rushing sound, 

Her blue peaks rose before liim. 

He licld his slaves, yet made withal 

No false and vain pretenses. 
Nor paid a lying priest to seek 

For scriptural defenses. 
His harshest words of proud rebuke, 
' His bitterest taunt and scorning, 
Fell fire-like on tlie Northern brow 
That bent to him in fawning. 

■ He held his slaves, yet kept the while 

His reverence for the Human ; 
In the dark vassals of his will 

He saw but man and woman. 
No hunter of (rod's outraged poor 

His Roanoke valley entered ; 
No trader in the souls of men 

Across his threshold ventured. 

And when tlie old and wearied man 
Lay down for his last sleeping, 

And at his side, a slave no more. 
His brother-man stood weeping, 



John Greenleaf Wiiittier. 247 

His latest thought, his latest breath, 

To freedom's duty giving, 
With ftiiling tongue and trembling hand 

The dying blest the living. 

1 never bore his ancient State 

A truer sou or braver ; 
None trampling with a calmer scorn 

On foreign hate or favor. 
He knew her faults, yet never stooped 

His proud and manly feeling 
To poor excuses of the wrong 

Or meanness of concealing. 

But none beheld with clearer eye, 

The plague-spot o'er her spreading. 
None heard more sure the steps of Doom 

Along her future treading. 
For her as for himself he spake, 

When, his gaunt frame up-bracing, 
He traced with dying hand " REMORSE ! " 

And perished in the tracing. 

As from the grave where Henry sleeps, 

From Vernon's weeping willow. 
And from the grassy pall which hides 

The Sage of Monticello, 
So from the leaf- strewn burial-stone 

Of Randolph's lowly dwelling, 
Virginia I o'er thy land of slaves 

A warning voice is swelling. 

And hark ! from thy deserted fields 

Are sadder warnings spoken. 
From quenched hearths, where thy exiled sons 

Their household gods have broken. 
The curse is on thee — wolves for men. 

And briers for corn-sheaves giving I 
1 more than all thy dead renown 

Were now one hero living. 



248 Initial Stitdies ix American Letters. 

OLIVEB WENDELL HOLMES. 

Old Ironsides. 

Ay, tear her tattered ensign down! 

Long has it waved on high, 
And many an eye has danced to see 

That banner in the sky ; 
Beneath it rung tlie battle shout, 

And burst the cannon's roar; 
The meteor of the ocean air 

Shall sweep the clouds no more. 

Her deck, once red with heroes' blood. 

Where knelt the vanquished foe, 
When winds were hurrying o'er the flood, 

And waves were whito below, 
No more shall feel the victor's tread, 

Or know the conquered knee; — 
The harpies of t];e shore shall pluck 

The eagle of the sea. 

0, better that her shattered hulk 

Should sink beneath the wave : 
Her thunders shook the mighty deep, 

And tliero should be her grave ; 
Nail to the mast her holy flag, 

Set every threadbare sail, 
And give her to the god of storms. 

The lightning and the gale ! 

The Last Leaf. 

I SAW him once before, 
As he passed by the door, 

And again 
The pavement stones resound. 
As he totters o'er the ground 

"With his cane. 

They say that in his prime. 
Ere the pruning-knife of time 
Cut him down, 



Oliver Wendell Holmes. 249 

Not a better man was found 
By the Crier ou his round 
Through the town. 

But now he walks the streets, 
And lie looks at all he meets 

Sad and wan, 
And he shakes his feeble head, 
That it seems as if he said, 

" They are gone." 

The mossy marbles rest 

On the lips that he has pressed 

In their bloom, • 

And the names he loved to hear 
Have been carved for many a year 

On the tomb. 

My grandmamma has said — 

Poor old lady, she is dead , 

Long ago — 
That he had a Roman nose, 
And his cheek was like a rose 

In the snow. 

But now his nose is thin, 
And it rests upon his chin 

Like a stafiF, 
And a crook is in his back, 
And a melancholy crack 

In his laugh. 

I know it is a sin 
For me to sit and griu 

At him here ; 
But the old three-cornered hat, 
And the breeches, and all that, 

Are so queer! 

And if I should live to be 
The last leaf upon the tree 
In the spring, 



250 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

Let them smile, as T do now, 
At the old forsaken bough 
"Where I clins. 



My Aunt. 

My aunt! my dear, unmarried aunt! 

Long years have o'er her flown ; 
Yet slill she strains the aching clasp 

That binds her virgin zone ; 
I know it hurts her, though slie looks 

As cheerful as she can ; 
Her waist is ampler than her life, 

For life is but a span. 

My aunt I my poor deluded aunt! 

Her hair is almost gray ; 
Why will slie train that winter curl 

In such a spring-like way? 
How can she lay her glasses down. 

And say she reads as well, 
When, tliroiigli a double convex lens. 

She just makes out to spell? 

Her father — grandpapa I forgive 

This erring lip its smiles — 
Vowed she should make the finest girl 

Within a hundred miles; 
He sent her to a stylish school ; 

'Twas in her thirteenth June; 
And with her, as the rules required, 

" Two towels and a spoon." 

They braced my aunt against a board, 

To make lier straight and tall ; 
They laced her up, they starved her down, 

To make her light and small ; 
Tlioy pinched her feet, tliey singed her hair, 

They screwed it up with pins; 
0, never mortal suffered more 

In penance for her sins. 



Oliver Wendkll Holmes. 251 

So when my precious aunt was done, 

My graudsire brought her buck 
(By daylight, lest some rabid youth 

Might follow on the track); 
" Ah ! " said my grandsire, as lie shook 

Some powder in his pan, 
"What could this lovely creature do 

Against a desperate man? " 

Alas ! nor chariot, nor barouche, 

Nor bandit cavalcade, 
Tore from the trembling father's arms 

His all-accomplished maid. 
For her how happ}' had it been ! 

And Heaven had spared to me 
To see one sad ungathered rose 

On my ancestral tree. 



EDGAR ALLAN" POE. 

To Helen. 

Helen, tliy beauty is to me 

Like those Nicean barks of yore, 

That gently, o'er a perfumed sea, 
The weary, wayworn wanderer bore 
To his own native shore. 

On desperate seas long wont to roam, 
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face, 

Thy Naiad airs have brought me home 
To the glory that was Greece 

And the grandeur that was Rome. 

Lo I in yon brilliant window-niche 
How statue-like I see thee stand. 
The agate lamp within thy hand ! 

Ah ! Psyche, from the regions which 
Are Holy Land I 



252 Initial Studies in American Letters. 



To One in Paradise. 

Thou wast that all to me, love, 

For which my soul did pine : 
A green isle in the sea, love, 

A fountain and a shrine 
All wreathed with fairy fruits and flowers, 

And all the flowers were mine. 

Ah, dream too briglit to last ! 

Ah, starry hope ! that did'st arise 
But to be overcast ! 

A voice from out the future cries 
On ! on ! But o'er the past 

(Dim gulf!) my spirit hovering lies, 
Mute, motionless, aghast ! 

For, alas I alas ! with me 

The liglit of life is o'er. 

" No more — no more — no more — " 
(Such language holds the solemn sea 

To tlie sands upon the shore) 
Shall bloom the thunder-blasted tree, 

Or the stricken eagle soar 1 

And all my days are trances, 

And all my nightly dreams 
Are where thy dark eye glances. 

And where thy footstep gleams, — 
In what ethereal dances, 

Bv what eternal streams ! 



From "The Fall of the House of Usher." 

At the termination of this sentence I started, and for a moment paused ; 
for it appeared to me (although T at once concluded that my excited fancy 
had deceived me) — it appeared to me that, from some very remote portion 
of the mansion there came, indistinctly, to my ears what might iiave been, 
in its exact similarity of character, the echo (but a shifted and dull one 



Edgar Allan Poe. 253 

certain!}') of the very cracking and ripping sound wliicli Sir iJauncelot had 
80 particularly described. It was, beyond doubt, the coincidence alone which 
had arrested my attention; for amid the rattling of the sashes of the case- 
ments, and the ordinary commingled noises of the still-increasing storm, 
tlie sound, in itself, had nothing, surely, which should have interested or 
disturbed me. I continued the story. 

Here again I paused abruptly, and now with a feeling of wild amazement 
— for there could be no doubt wliatever that, in this instance, I did actually 
he.ir (although from what direction it proceeded I found it impossible to 
say) a low and apparently distant, but harsh, protracted, and most unusual 
screaming or grating sound, the exact counterpart of what my fancy had 
already conjured up for the dragon's unnatural shriek, as described by the 
romancer. Oppressed, as I certainly was, upon the occurrence of this sec- 
ond and most extraordinary coincidence, by a thousand conflicting sensa- 
tions, in which wonder and extreme terror were predominant, I still retained 
sufficient presence of mind to avoid exciting, by any observation, the sensi- 
tive nervousness of my companion. I was by no means certain that he had 
noticed the sounds in question ; although, assuredly, a strange alteration 
had, during the last few minutes, taken place in liis demeanor. From a 
position fronting my own he had graduallj' brought round his chair so as 
to sit with his face to the door of the chamber, and thus I could but par- 
tially perceive his features, althougli I saw that his lips trembled as if he 
were murmuring iuaudibly. His head had dropped upon his breast; yet I 
knew that he was not asleep, from the wide and rigid opening of the eye as 
1 caught a glance of it in profile. The motion of his body, too, was at vari- 
ance with this idea ; for lie rocked from side to side with a gentle yet con- 
stant and uniform sway. Having rapidly taken notice of all this I resumed 
tlie narrative of Sir Launcelot. 

No sooner had these syllables passed my lips than — as if a shield of 
brass had indeed, at the moment, fallen heavily upon a floor of silver — I 
became aware of a distinct, iiollow, metallic, and clangorous, yet apparently 
muffled, reverberation. Completely unnerved, I leaped to my feet; but the 
measured, rocking movenient of Usher was undisturbed. I rushed to the 
chair in which lie sat. His eyes were bent fixedlj^ before him, and through- 
out his whf)le countenance there reigned a stony rigidity. But as I placed 
my hand upon his shoulder there came a strong shudder over his whole 
person ; a sickly smile quivered about his lips ; and I saw that he spoke 
in a low, hurried, and gibbering manner, as if unconscious of my presence. 
Bending closely over him, I at length drank in the hideous import of his words. 



254 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

"Not hear it? Yes, I hear it, and have heard it. Long — long— long — 
many minutes, many hours, many days have I heard .it — yet 1 dared 
not — 0, pity me, miserable wretch that I am I — I dared not — I dared not 
speak ! Wt have put her living in the tomb ! Said I not that my senses 
were acnite ? 1 now tell you that 1 heard her first feeble movements in tlie 
hollow coffin. I heard them many, many days ago — yet I dared not — I 
dared not speak ! And now — to-night — Ethelred — ha! ha I — the breaking 
of tiie liermit's door, and the death-cry of the dragon, and the clangor of 
the shield ! — saj', rather, the rending of her coffin, and the grating of the 
iron hinges of her prison, and lier struggles witliin the coppered archway 
of the vault! 0, whither shah I fly ? "Will she not be here anon ? Is she 
not hurrying to upbraid me for my haste ? Have I not lieard her footstep 
on the stair ? Do I not distinguish that heavy and horrible beating of her 
heart ? Madman I " — here he sprang furiously to his feet and slirieked out 
his syllables, as if in the effort he were giving up his soul — ''Madman! I 
tell you that she now stands without the door ! " 

As if in the superhuman energy of his utterance there had been found the 
potency of a spell, the huge antique panels to which the speaker pointed threw 
slowly back, upon the instant, their ponderous and ebony jaws. It was tlie work 
of the rushing gust ; but then without tliose doors there did stand the lofty 
and enshrouded figure of the Lady Madeline of Usher. Tliere was blood 
upon her wliite robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every 
portion of her emaciated frame. For a moment she remained trembling 
and reeling to and fro upon the threshold — then, with a low, moaning cry, 
fell lieavily inward upon tlio person of her brotlier, and, in her violent and 
now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse and a victim to the 
terrors he had anticipated. 

From that chamber and from that mansion I fled aghast. The storm was 
still abroad in all its wrath as I found myself crossing the old causeway. 
Suddenly there shot along the path a wild light, and I turned to see whence 
a gleam so unusual could have issued, for the vast house and its shadows 
were alone behind me. Tlie radiance was that of the full, setting, and 
blood-red moon, which now shone vividly through that once barely discern- 
ible fissure of which I have before spoken as extending from the roof of 
'the building, in a zigzag direction, to the base. While I gazed this fissure 
rapidly widened; there came a fierce breath of the whirlwind — the entire 
orb of tlie satellite burst at once upon my sight — ray brain reeled as I saw 
ihe mighty walls rushing asunder — there was a long, tumultuous, shouting 
sound like the voice of a tliousand waters — and the deep and dark tarn at 
my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the House of 
Usher. 



Nathaniel Parker Willis. 255 

nathaniel parker willis. 
Unseen Spirits. 

The shadows lay along Broadway, 

'Twas near the twilight tide — 
Aud slowly there a lady fair 

Was walking in her pride. 
Alone walked she; but, viewlessly, 

Walked spirits at her side.' 

Peace charmed the street beneath her feet, 

Aud Honor charmed the air ; 
And all astir looked kind on her, 

And called her good as fair — 
For all God ever gave to her 

She kept with chary care. 

She kept with care her beauties rare 

From lovers warm and true; 
For her heart was cold to all but gold. 

And the rich came not to woo ; 
But honored well are charms to sell, z' 

If priests the selling do. 

Now walking there was one more fair — 

A slight girl, lily-pale; 
And she had unseen company 

To make the spirit quail — 
'Twixt Want and Scorn she walked forlorn, 

And nothing could avail. 

No mercy now can clear her brow 

For this world's peace to pray ; 
For, as love's wild prayer dissolved in air, 

Her woman's heart gave way ! 
But the sin forgiven by Christ in heaven 

By man is cursed alway. 

N AH ANT. 

Here we are, then, in the "Swallow's Cave." The floor descends by a 
gentle declivity to the sea, and from the long dark cleft stretching outward 
you look forth upon the Atlantic — the shore of Ireland the first terra firma 



256 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

in the path of your eye. Here is a dark pool, left bj- the retreating tide for 
a refrigerator; and with the champagne in the midst we will recline about 
it like the soft Asiatics of whom we learned pleasure in the East, and drink 
to the small-featured and purple-lipped "Mignons" of Syria — those tine- 
hmbed and fiery slaves adorable as peris, and by turns languishing and 
stormy, whom you buy for a pinch of piastres (say £5 5s.) in sunny Damas- 
cus. Your drowsy Circassian, faint and dreamy, or your crockery Georgian 
— fit dolls for the sensual Turk — is, to him who would buy soul, dear at a 
penny the hecatomb. 

We recline, as it were, in an ebon pyramid with a liundred feet of floor 
and sixty of wall, and the fourth side open to the sky. The light comes in 
mellow and dim, and the sharp edges of the rocky portal seem let into the 
pearly heaven. The tide is at half-ebb, and the advancing and retreating 
waves, wliich at first just lifted the fringe of crimson dulse at the lip of the 
cavern, now dash tlieir spraj'-pearls on the rock below, the " tenth " surge 
alone rallying as if in scorn of its retreating fellow, and, like the chieftain of 
Culloden Moor, rushing back singly to the contest. And now that the 
waters reach the entrance no more, come forward and look on the sea I The 
swell lifts! Would you not think the bases of the earth rising beneath it? 
It falls I Would you not think the foundation of the deep had given way? 
A plain, broad enough for the navies of the world to ride at large, heaves 
up evenly and steadilj' as if it would lie against the sky, rests a moment 
spell-bound in its place, and falls again as far — the respiration of a sleeping 
child not more regular and full of slumber. It is only on the shore that it 
chafes. Blessed emblem 1 it is at peace with itself I Tiie rocks war with a 
nature so uuhke their own, and the hoarse din of their border onsets resounds 
through the caverns they have rent open; but bej'ond, in the calm bosom of 
the ocean, what heavenly dignity! what godlike unconsciousness of alarm! 
I did not think we should stumble on such a moral in the cave! 

By the deeper bass of its hoarse organ the sea is now plaj-ing upon its 
lowest stops, and the tide is down. Hear how it rushes in beneath the 
rocks, broken and stilled in its tortuous waj', till it ends with a washing 
and dull hiss among the sea-weed, and, like a myriad of small tinkling bells, 
the dripping from the crags is audible. There is fine music in the sea! 

And now the beach is bare. The cave begins to cool and darken, and 
the first gold tint of sunset is stealing into the sky, and the sea looks of a 
changing opal, green, purple, and white, as if its floor were paved with 
pearl, and the changing light struck up through the waters. And there 
heaves a ship into the horizon like a white-winged bird, lying with dark 
breast on the waves, abandoned of the sea-breeze within siglit of port, and 
repelled even by the spicy breatli that comes with a welcome off the shore. 



Nathaniel Parker Willis. 251 

She comes from "Merry England." She is freig'ik'd with more than mer- 
chandise. The home-siclc exile will gaze on her snowy sail as slie sets in 
with the morning breeze, and bless it, for the wind that first filled it on its 
way swept through the green valley of his home 1 What links of human 
affection brings slie over the sea ? How much comes in her that is not in 
her " bill of lading," yet' worth to the heart that is waiting for it a thousand 
times the purchase of her whole venture ! 

Mais montons nous! I hear the small hoofs of Thalaba; my stanliopo 
waits; we will leave this half bottle of champagne, that "remainder bis- 
cuit," and the echoes of our philosophy to the Naiads who have lent us 
their drawing-room. Undine, or Egerial Lurly, or Arethusa! whatever 
thou art called, nymph of this shadowy cave I adieu ! 

Slowly, Thalaba! Tread gingerly down this rocky descent! So! Here 
we are on the floor of the vasty deep! What a glorious race-course! Tlie 
polished and printless sand spreads away before you as far as the eye can see, 
the surf comes in below breast-high ere it breaks and the white fringe of 
the sliding wave shoots up the beach, but leaves room for tlie marching of 
a Persian phalanx on the sands it has deserted. 0, how noiselessly runs 
the wheel, and how dreamily we glide along, feeling our motion but in the 
resistance of the wind and in the trout-like pull of the ribands by the 
excited animal before us. Mark the color of the sand ! White at high- 
water mark, and thence deepening to a silvery gray as the water has evap- 
orated less, a slab of Egyptian granite in the obelisk of St. Peter's not more 
polished and imimpressible. Shell or rock, weed or quicksand, there is 
none; and, mar or deface its bright surface as you will, it is ever beaten 
down anew, and washed even of the dust of the foot of man by the return- 
ing sea. You may write upon its fine-grained face witli a crow-quill — you 
may course over its dazzling expanse with a troop of chariots. 

Most wondrous and beautiful of all, within twenty yards of the surf, or 
for an hour after the tide has left the sand, it holds the water without losing 
its firmness, and is like a gay mirror, bright as the bosom of the sea. (By 
your leave, Thalaba!) And now lean over the dasher and see those small 
fetlocks striking up from beneath — the flying mane, the thoroughbred ac- 
tion, the small and expressive head, as perfect in the reflection as in the real- 
ity ; like Wordsworth's swan, he 

" T?vts double, horse and shadow," 

You would swear you were skinmiing the surface of the sea ; and the 
delusion is more complete as the white foam of the " tenth wave " skims in 
beneath wheel and hoof, and you urge on with the treacherous element 
gliding away visibly beneath you, 
17 



258 Initial I^tudies in American Lktteks. 

HENBY DAVID THOKEAXT. 
The Winter Woods. 

[From Excxirsions.] 

There is a slumbering subterranean fire in nature wliicli never goes out, 
and which uo cold can chill. It finally melts the great snow, and in Jan- 
nary or July is only buried under a thicker or thinner covering. In the 
coldest day it flows somewhere, and the snow melts around every tree. 
TJiis field of winter rye which sprouted late in the fall and now speedily 
dissolves the snow is where the fire is very thinly covered. We feel 
warmed by it. In the winter warmth stands for all virtue, and we resort in 
thought to a trickling rill, witli its bare stones shining in the sun, and to 
warm springs in the woods, with as much eagerness as rabbits and robins. 
The steam which rises from swamps and pools is as dear and domestic as 
that of our own kettle. What fire could ever equal the sunshine of a win- 
ter's day, when the meadow-mice come out by the wall-sides, and the chick- 
adee lisps in the defiles of the wood? The warmth comes directly from the 
sun, and is not radiated from the earth as in summer; and when we feel his 
beams on our backs as we are treading some snowy dell we are grateful as for 
a special kindness, and bless the sun which has followed us into that by-place. 

This subterranean fire has its altar in each man's breast, for in the coldest 
day, and on the bleakest hill, the traveler cherishes a warmer fire witliin the 
folds of his cloak than is kindled on any hearth. A healthy man, indeed, is 
the complement of the seasons, and in winter summer is in his heart. There 
is the South. Tiiither have all birds and insects migrated, and around the 
warm spi'ings in his breast are gathered the robin and the lark. 

At length, having reached the edge of the woods and shut out the gadding 
town, we enter within their covert as we go under the roof of a cottage, and 
cross its threshold, all ceiled and banked up with snow. They are glad and 
warm still, and as genial and cheery in winter as in sunnner. A s we stand in 
llie midst of the pines, in the flickering and checkered light which straggles 
but little way into their maze, we wonder if the towns have ever heard their 
simple story. It seems to us that no traveler has ever explored tiiem, and 
uolwithstanding the wonders which science is elsevviierc revealing every 
(lay, who would not like to hear their annals? Our humble villages in the 
plain are their contribution. We borrow from tlie forest the boards which 
shelter and the sticks which warm us. How important is their evergreen 
to the winter, that portion of the summer which does not fade, the perma- 
nent year, the unwithered grass. Thus simply and with little expense of 
altitude is the surface of the earth diversified. Wliat would human life be 
without forests, those natural cities? From the tops of mountains they 



Henry David Thorkau. 259 

appear like sniuotli-t^liaveu lawns; yet whither shall we walk but in this 
taller grass? 

In this glade covered with bushes of a year's growth see how tiie silvery 
dust lies on every seared leaf and twig, deposited in such inlinite and luxu- 
rious forms as by their very variety atone for the absence of color. Ob- 
serve the tiny tracks of mice around every stem, and the triangular tracks 
of the rabbit. A pure elastic heaven hangs over all, as if the impurities of 
the summer sky, refined and shrunk by the chaste winter's cold, had been 
winnowed by the heavens upon tlie earth. 

Nature confounds her summer distinctions at this season. The heavens 
seem to be nearer the earth. The elements are less reserved and distinct. 
"Water turns to ice; rain to snow. The day is but a Scandinavian night. 
The winter is an arctic summer. 

How nuich more living is the life that is in nature, the furred life which 
still stnwives tiie stinging nights, and, from amidst fields and woods covered 
with frost and snow, sees the sun rise ! 

" The f Godless wilds 
Pour forth their brown inhabitants." 

The gray squirrel and rabbit are brisk and playful in the remote glens, 
even on the morning of the cold Friday. Here is our Lapland and Labra. 
dor; and for our Esquimatix and Knistenaux, Dog-ribbed Indians, Novazem- 
blaites, and Spitzbcrgeners, are there not the ice-cutter and wood-chopper, 
the fox, musk-rat, and mink? 

Still, in the midst of the arctic day we may trace the summer to its re- 
treats and sympathize with some contemporary life. Stretched over the 
brooks, in the midst of the frost-bound meadows, we may observe the subma- 
rine cottages of the caddice- worms, the larvie of the Plicipennes. Their small 
cylindrical cases built around themselves, composed of flags, sticks, grass, 
and withered leaves, shells and pebbles, in form and color like the wrecks 
which strew tlie bottom, now drifting along over the pebbly bottom, now 
wlurling in tiny eddies and dashing down steep falls, or sweeping rapidly 
along with the current, or else swaj-ing to and fro at the end of some grass- 
blade or root. Anon they will leave their sunken habitations, and, crawling 
np the stems of plants or to tlie surface like gnats, as perfect insects hence- 
forlli, flutter over the surface of the water or sacrifice their short lives in 
the flame of our candle at evening. Down yonder little glen the shrubs 
are drooping under their burden, and the red alder-berries contrast with the 
while ground. Here are the marks of a myriad feet which have already 
been abroad. The sun lises as proudly over such a glen as over the valley 
of the Seine or Tiber, and it seems ttie residence of a pure andself-subsistent 
valor such as they never witnessed, which never knew defeat or fear. 



260 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

Here reign the simplicity and purity of a primitive age and a health and 
hope far remote from towns and cities. Standing quite alone, far in the forest, 
while the wind is shaking down snow from the trees, and leaving the only 
human tracks behind us, we find our reflections of a richer variety than the 
life of cities. The chickadee and nut-iiatch are more inspiring society tiian 
statesmen and pliilosophers, and we shall return to these last as to more 
vulgar companions. In this lonely glen, with the brook draining the slopes, 
its creased ice and crystals of all hues, where the spruces and hemlocks 
stand up on either side, and the rush and sere wild oats in the rivulet itself, 
our lives are more serene and wortiiy to contemplate. 

As the day advances, the heat of the sun is reflected by the hill-sides, and 
we hear a faint but sweet music where flows the rill released from its fet- 
ters, and the icicles are melting on the trees, and the nut-hatch and par- 
tridge are heard and seen. The south wind melts the snow at noon, and 
the bare ground appears with its withered grass and leaves, and we are 
invigorated by tiie perfume which exhales from it as by the scent of strong 
meats. 

Let us go into this deserted woodman's hut, and see how ho has passed 
the long winter nights and the short and stormy da3's. For here man has 
lived under this south hill-side, and it seems a civilized and public spot. 
"We have sucli associations as when the traveler stands by the ruins of Pal- 
myra or Hecatompolis. Singing birds and flowers perchance have begun 
to appear here, for flowers as well as weeds follow in the footsteps of man. 
These hemlocks whispered over his head, these hickory logs were his fuel, 
and these pitch-pine roots kindled his fire; yonder fuming rill in the hollow, 
whose thin and airy vapor still ascends as busily as ever, though he is far 
off now, was his well. These hemlock bonghs, and the straw upon this 
raised platform, were his bed, and this broken dish held his drink. But he 
has not been here this season, for the phoebes built their nest upon this 
shelf last summer. I find some embers left, as if he had but just gone out, 
where he baked his pot of beans; and while at evening he smoked his pipe, 
whose stemless bowl lies in the ashes, chatted with his only companion, if 
perchance lie had auj^, about the depth of the snow on the morrow, already 
falling fast and thick without, or disputed whether the last sound was the 
screech of an owl or the creak of a bough, or imagination only; and thrt)ugh 
this broad chimney-throat, in the late winter evening, ere he stretched him- 
self upon the straw, he looked up to learn the progress of the storm, and, 
seeing the bright stars of Cassiopeia's chair shining brightly down upon hiiu, 
fell contentedly asleep. 

See how many traces from which we may learn the chopper's history. 
From this stump we may guess the sharpness of liis ax, and from the slope 



Henry David Thoreau. 2^1 

of the stroke, on which side lie stood, and whether he cut down the iroe 
without going round it or changing hands ; and from tlie flexure of llie 
splinters, we may liuow which wa}' it fell. This one chip contains inscribed 
on it the whole history of the wood-chopper and of the world. On this 
scrap of paper, which held his sugar or salt perchance, or was the wadding 
of his gun, sitting on a log in the forest, with what interest we read the 
tattle of cities, of those larger huts, empty and to let, like this, in High 
Streets and Broadways. 



■walt ■whitman". 
The Miracles op Nature. 

LFrom Leaver of Gross.] 

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle, 

Every inch of space is a miracle. 

Every square yard of the surface of the eartli is spread with the same, 

Every cubic foot of the interior swarms with the same. 

To me the sea is a continual miracle, 

The fishes that swim — the rocks— the motion of the waves — the ships with 

men in them, 
What stranger miracles are there ? 

I was thinking the day most splendid, till T saw what the not-day exhibited ; 
I was thinking this globe enough, till there tumbled upon me myriads of 

other globes : 
O, how plainly I see now that this life cannot exhibit all to me — as the 

day cannot ; 
0, I see that I am to wait for what will be exhibited by death. 

Death I 

0, the beautiful touch of Death, soothing and benumbing a few moments, 
for reasons. 

Tlie earth never tires. 

The earth is rude, silent, incomprehensible at first — 

Nature is rude and incomprehensible at first ; 

Be not discouraged — keep on — there are divine things, well enveloped; 

1 swear to you tliere are divine things more beautiful than words can tell. 



262 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

O Captain! My Captain! 

captain I m}' captain ! our fearful trip is done ; 
The ship lias weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won ; 
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting, 
While follow eyes tlie steady keel, the vessel grim and daring : 
But heart I heart 1 heart 1 
. Leave you not the little spot 

Where on the deck my captain lies, 
Fallen cold and dead. 

captain I my captain! rise up and hear the bells ; 
Rise up — for you the flag is flung — for j^ou the bugle trills; 
For you bouquets and ribboned wreaths— for you the shores a-crowding; 
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning; 
captain 1 dear father 1 

This arm I push beneath you ; 
It is some dream that on the deck 
You've fallen cold and dead. 

My captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still ; 
My fother does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will ; 
But the ship, the ship is anchored safe, its voyage closed and done; 
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won; 
Exult, shores, and ring, bells 1 
But I, with silent tread, 

Walk the spot my captain lies, 
Fallen cold and dead. 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 

The Courtin'. 

Zekle crep' up, quite unbekqowa, 
An' peeked in thru the winder, 

An' there sot Huldy all alone, 
'ith no one nigh to hender. 

Agin the chimbly crooknecks hung, 

An' in amongst 'era rusted 
The ole queen's arm thet Gran'ther Young 

Fetched back from Concord busted. 



James Russet.l Lowetj.. 263 

The wannut logs shot sparkles out 

Toward the pootiest, bless her! 
An' leetle fires danced all about 

The chiny on the dresser. 

The very room, coz she wuz in, 

Looked warm from floor to ceilin', 
An' she looked full ez rosy agin 

Ez th' apples she wuz peelin'. 

She heerd a foot an' knowed it, tu, 

A-raspin' on the scraper ; 
All ways to once her feelin's flew 

Like sparks in burnt-up paper. 

He kin' o' I'itered on the mat, 

Some doubtfle o' the seekle ; 
His heart kep' goin' pitypat, 

But hern went pity Zekle. 



The Pious Editor's Creed. 

[From Biglmv Papers."] 
I DU believe in Freedom's causey 

Ez fur away as Paris is; 
I love to see her stick her claws 

In them infarnal Pharisees ; 
It's wal enough agin a king 

To dror resolves an' triggers — 
But libbaty's a kind o' thing 

Thet don't agree with niggers. 

I du believe the people want 

A tax on teas an' coffees, 
Thet nothin' aint extra vygunt, 

Pervidin' I'm in office; 
Fer I hev loved my country sence 

My eye-teeth filled their sockets. 
An' Uncle Sam I reverence — 

Partic'larly his pockets. 

I du believe in any plan 
0' levyin' the taxes, 



264 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

Ez long ez, like a lumbermau, 

I git jest wut I axes : 
I go free-trade thru thick an' thin. 

Because it kind o' rouses 
The folks to vote — an' keeps ua in 

Our quiet custom-houses. 

I du believe with all my soul 

In the gret Press's freedom, 
To pint the people to the goal 

An' in the traces lead 'em ; * 

Palsied the arm thet forges jokes 

At my fat contracts squintin', 
An' withered be the nose that pokes 

Inter the gov'ment printin' I 

I du believe thet I should give 

Wut's his'n unto Ctesar, 
Fer it's by him I move an' live, 

Frum him my bread and cheese air ; 
I du believe thet all o' me 

Doth bear his souperscription, — 
Will, conscience, honor, honesty. 

An' things o' thet description. 

I du believe in prayer an' praise 

To him thet hez the grantin' 
0' jobs, — in every thin' that pays, 

But most of all in CANTIN' ; 
This doth my cup with marcies fill. 

This lays all tliought o' sin to rest, — 
I donH believe in princerple, 

But, 0, I du in interest. 

I du beheve in bein' this 

Or thet, ez it may happen 
One way or t'other hendiest is 

To ketch the people nappin' ; 
It aint by princerples nor men 

My preudent course is steadied, — 
I scent wich pays the best, an' tliea 

Go into it baldbeaded. 



James Russetx Loavell. 265 

I du believe thet holdin' slaves 

Comes nat'ral tu a Presidunt, 
Let 'lone the rowdedow it saves 

To hev a wal-broke precedunt ; 
Per any office, small or gret, 

I couldn't ax with no face, 
Without I'd ben, thru dry an' wet, 

Th' unrizzest kind o' doughface. 

I du believe wutever trash 

Ml keep the people in blindness,— 
Thet we the Mexicans can thrash 

Right inter brotherly kindness ; 
Tliet bombshells, grape, an' powder 'n' ball 

Air good-will's strongest magnets ; 
Thet peace, to make it stick at all, 

Must be druv in with bagnets. 

In short, I firmly du believe 

In Humbug generally, 
Fer it's a thing that I perceive 

To hev a solid vally ; 
This heth my faithful shepherd ben. 

In pasturs sweet heth led me, 
An' this 'U keep the people green 

To feed ez they hev fed me. 



ED'WABD EVEBETT HALE. 

[From The Man Without a Country J} 

The rule adopted on board the sliips on which I have met " the man 
without a country " was, I think, transmitted from the beginning. No mess 
liked to have him permanently, because his presence cut off all talk of 
home or of the prospect of return, of politics or letters, of peace or of 
war — cut off more than half the talk men liked to have at sea. But it was 
always thought too hard that he should never meet the rest of us except 
to touch hats, and we finally sank into one system. He was not permitted 
to talk with the men unless an officer was by. With officers he had 

• See page 195. 



266 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

unrestrained intercourse, as far as he and they chose. But ho grew shy, 
though he had favorites ; I was one. Then the captain always asked him 
to dinner on Monday. Every mess in succession took up the invitation in 
its turn. According to the size of the sliip, you had him at your mess more 
or less often at dinner. His breakfast he ate in his own state-room — he 
always had a state-room — which was where a sentinel or somebody on the 
watch could see the door. And whatever else he ate or drank, he ate or 
drank alone. Sometimes, when the marines or sailors had any special jol- 
lification, they were permitted to invite "Plain-Buttons," as they called him. 
Tlien Nolan was sent with some officer, and the men were forbidden to 
speak of home while he was there. I believe the theory was that the sight 
of his punishment did them good. They called him "Plain-Buttons" be- 
cause, while he always chose to wear a regulation army uniform, he was not 
permitted to wear the army button, for the reason that it bore either the 
initials or the insignia of the country he had disowned. 

I remember soon after I joined the navy I was on shore with some of the 
older officers from our ship and from the Brandywine, which we had met at 
Alexandria. We had leave to make a party and go up to Cairo and the Pyra- 
mids. As we jogged along (you went on donkeys then), some of the gentle- 
men (we bo}'s called them " Dons," but the phrase was long since changed) 
fell to talking about Nolan, and some one told the system which was adopted 
from the first about his books and other reading. As he was almost never per- 
mitted to go on shore, even though the vessel lay in port for months, his time 
at the best hung heavy; and every body was permitted to lend him books, 
if they were not published in America, and made no allusion to it. These 
were common enough in the old days, when people in the other hemisphere 
talked of the United States as little as we do of Paraguay. He had almost 
all the foreign papers that came into the ship, sooner or later ; only some- 
body must go over them first, and cut out any advertisement or stray para- 
graph that, alluded to America. This was a little cruel sometimes, when 
the back of what was cut might be as innocent as Hesiod. "Eight in the 
midst of one of Napoleon's battles, or one of Canning's speeches, poor Nolan 
would find a great hole, because on the back of the page of that paper there 
had been an advertisement of a packet for New York, or a scrap from the 
President's message. I say this was the first time I ever heard of this plan, 
which afterward I had enough and more than enough to do with. I re- 
member it, because poor Phillips, who was of the party, as soon as the allusion 
to reading was made, told a story of something which happened at tlie Cape 
of Good Hope on Nolan's first voyage; and it is the only thing I ever 
knew of that voyage. They had touched at the Cape, and had done the 
civil thing with the English admiral and the fleet, and then, leaving for a 



Edward Everett TTale. 267 

long cruise up the Indian Ocean, Pliillips bad borrowed a lot of English 
books from an olBcer, which, in those days, as indeed in these, was quite a 
windfall. Among them, as the devil would order, was the Lay of the Last Min- 
strel, which they had all of them heard of, but wliicli most of them had never 
seen. I think it could not have been published long. Well, nobody thought 
there could be any risk of any thing national in that, though Phillips swore 
old Shaw had cut out the " Tempest " from Shakespeare before he let Nolan 
have it, because he said " the Bermudas ought to be ours, and, by Jove, 
should be one day." So Nolan was permitted to join the circle one after- 
noon when a lot of them sat on deck smoking and reading aloud. People 
do not do such things so often now; but wiien I was young we got rid of a 
great deal of time so. Well, so it happened that in his turn Nolan took 
the book and read to the others; and he read very well, as I know. No- 
body in the circle knew a line of the poem, only it was all magic and border 
chivalry, and was ten thousand years ago. Poor Nolan read steadily 
through the fifth canto, stopped a minute and drank something, and then 
began without a thought of what was coming: 

" Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, 
Who never to himself hath said " — 

It seemed impossible to us that any body ever heard this for the first time; 
but all these fellows did then, and poor Nolan himself went on, still uncon- 
sciously or mechanically : 

" This is my own, my native land I " 

Then they all saw something was to pay ; but he expected to get through, 
I suppose, turned a little pale, but plunged on : 

" Whose heart hath ne'er within him burned. 
As home his footsteps he hath turned 

From wandering on a foreign strand? — 
If such there breathe, go, mark him well." 

By this time the men were all beside themselves, wishing there was any 
way to make him turn over two pages ; but he had not quite presence of 
mind for that ; he gagged a litlle, colored crimson, and staggered on : 

"For him no minstrel raptures swell; 
High tiiough his titles, proud his name. 
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim. 
Despite these titles, power, and pelf, 
The wretch, concentered all in self;" — 



268 Initial, Studies in American Letters. 

and here the poor fellow choked, could not go on, but started up, swung 
the book into the sea, vanished into his state-room. " And by Jove," said 
Phillips, " we did not see him for two montlis again. And I had lo make 
up some beggarly story to that English surgeon why I did not return his 
Walter Scott to him." 



FITZ-GBEElfE HALLECK. 
LFrorn Marco Bozzaris.] 
Comb to the bridal-chamber, Death 1 

Come to the mother's when slie feels 
For the first time her first-born's breath; 

Come when the blessed seals 
That close the pestilence are broke, 
And crowded cities wail its stroke; 
Come in consumption's ghastly form, 
Tlie earthquake shock, the ocean-storm ; 
Come when the heart beats high and warm, 

With banquet-song, and dance, and wine: 
And thou art terrible — the tear, 
The groan, the knell, the pall, the bier; 
And all we know, or dream, or fear 

Of agony, are thine. 

But to the hero, when his sword 

Has won the battle for the free, 
Thy voice sounds like a prophet's word ; 
And ia its hollow tones are heard 

The thanks of millions yet to be. 
Come, when his task of fame is wrought — 
Come, with her laurel-leaf, blood-bouglit — 

Come in her crowning hour — and then 
Thy sunken eye's unearthly light 
To him is welcome as the sight 

Of sky and stars to prisoned men ; 
Tiiy grasp is welcome as the hand 
Of brother in a foreign land ; 
Thy summons welcome as the cry 
That told the Indian isles were nigh 

To the world-seeking Grenoese, 
When the land-wind, from woods of palm. 
And orange-groves, and fields of balm. 

Blew o'er the Haytian seas. 



Fitz-Grkene IIalleck. 269 

Bozzaris ! with the storied brave 

Greece nurtured in her glory's time, 
Rest tliee — tliere is no prouder grave, 

Even in her own proud climo. 
She wore no funeral weeds for tliee, 

Nor bade the dark hoarse wave its plume, 
Like torn branch from death's leutless tree 
In sorrow's pomp and pageantry, 

Tlie heartless luxury of the tomb; 
But she remembers thee as one 
Long loved, and for a season gone; 
For thee lier poet's lyre is wreathed, 
Her marble wrought, her music breathed; 
For thee she rings the birtliday bells; 
Of thee her babes' first lisphig tells; 
For thine her evening prayer is said. 
At palace couch and cottage bed ; 
Her soldier, closing with the foe, 
Gives for thy sake a deadlier blow ; 
His plighted maiden, when she fears 
For liim, ihe joy of her young years, 
Thinks of thj^ fate and checks her tears. 

And she, the mother of thy boys, 
Tliough in her eye and faded check 
Is read the grief she will not speak, 

The memory of her buried joys. 
And even she who gave thee birtii, 
Will by their pilgrim-circled liearth 

Talk of thy doom without a sigh : 
For thou art Freedom's now and Fame's, 
One of the few , the immortal names, 

That were not born to die. 



On the Death ov Joseph Rodman Drake. 

Green be the turf above tliee, 

Friend of my better days 1 
None knew thee but to love thee. 

Nor named thee but to praise. 



Tears fell, when thou wert dying, 
From eyes unused to weep, 

And long where thou art lying 
Will tears the cold turf stoep. 



270 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

Wlieii liuiirls, whose truth was proven 
Like tliiiic, are laid in earth, 

Tliere siioiild a wrealli be woven 
To tell the world their worth ; 

And T, who woke each morrow 
To clasp thy hand in mine, 

Who shared tliy joy and sorrow, 
Whose weal and woo were thine — 

It sliould bo mine to braid it 
Around thy faded brow ; 

But I've in vain essayed it, 
And feel I cannot now. 

While memory bids me weep thee. 
Nor thoughts nor words are free, 

The grief is fixed too deeply 
That mourns a man like thee. 



CHARLES FARRAR BROWNE. 

[From Lecture on the Moi'moiis.] 

Brother Kimrall is a gay and festive cuss, of some seventy summers, 
or some'er's there about. He has one thousand head of cattle and a hun- 
dred liead of wives. He says they are awful eaters. 

Mr. Kimball had a son, a lovely young man, who was married to ten 
interesting wives. But one day while he was absent from home these ten 
wives went out walking with a handsome j^oung man, which so enraged 
Mr. Kimball's son — which made Mr. Kimball's son so jealous — that he shot 
himself with a horse-pistol. 

The doctor who attended him — a very scientific man — informed me tiiat 
the bullet entered the parallelogram of his diaphragmatic thorax, superin- 
ducing hemorrhage in the outer cuticle of his basiiicon thaumaturgist. It 
killed him. I should have thought it would. 

(Soft Music.) 

I hope this sad end will be a warning to all young wives who go out 
walking with handsome young men. Mr. Kimball's son is now no more. 
He sleeps beneath the cypress, the myrtle, and the willow. Tlie music is a 
dirge by the eminent pianist for Mr. Kimball's son. He died by request. 



Charles Farrar Browne. 271 

I regret to say that efforts were made to make a Mormon of me wliile I 
was ill Utali. 

It was leap-year when I was there, and sevcutceu young widows, tiie 
wives of a deceased Mormon, offered me llieir licarls and hands. I called 
on them one day, and, taking their soft white hands in mine, which made 
eighteen hands altogether, I found them in tears, and I said, "Why is this 
thus? "What is the reason of ihis thnsness ? " 

They hove a sigh — seventeen sighs of different size. They said : 

" 0, soon thou wilt be gonested away ! " 

I told them that when I got ready to leave a place I wentestcd. 

They said, "Doth not like us?" 

I said, " I doth— I doth." 

I also said, "I hope your intentions are honorable, as I am a lone child, 
my parents being far — far away." 

Tiien they said, " Wilt not marry ns ? " 

I said, " 0, no, it cannot was ! " 

Again they asked me to marry them, and again I declined, when they 
cried, 

" 0, crnel man 1 this is too much 1 0, too mnch 1 " 

I told them that it was on account of the muchness that I declined. . . . 

{Pointing to Panorama.) 

A more cheerful view of the desert. 

The wild suow-storms have left us and we have thrown our wolf-skin 
overcoats aside. Certain tribes of far-western Indians bury their distin- 
guished dead by placing them high in air and covering them with valuable 
furs. That is a very fair representation of those mid-air tombs. Those 
animals are horses. I know they are, because my artist says so. I had 
the picture two years before I discovered the fact. The artist came to me 
ajjout six months ago and said, " It is useless to disguise it from yon any 
longer, they are horses." 

It was while crossing this desert that I was surrounded by a band of TJte 
Indians. They were splendidly mounted. They were dressed in beaver- 
skins, and they were armed with rifles, knives, and pistols. 

What coidd T do ? What could a poor old orpiian do? I'm a brave 
man. Tiie day before the battle of Bull's Run I stood in the highway while 
the bullets — those dreadful messengers of deatli — were passing all around 
me thickly — in wagons — on their way to the battle-field. But there were 
too many of these Injuns. There were forty of them, and only one of me, 
and so I said : 

" Great chief, I surrender." 



272 Initial Studies ix American Lettkus. 

His name was Wocky-bocky. Ho dismounted and ap[)roaclied me. I 
saw his tomahawk glisten in the morning sunliglit. Fire was in his eye. 
Wocky-bocky came very close 

{Pointing to Panorama) 

to me and seized me by the hair of my head. Ho mingled his swarthy 
fingers with my golden tresses, and lie rubbed his dreadful tomahawk across 
my lily-white face. He said: 

'• Torsha arrali darrah mishky booksheau ! " 

I told him he was right. 

Wocky-bocky again rubbed his tomahawk across ray face, and said: 

" Wink-iio-loo-boo 1 " 

Says I, "Mr. Wocky-bocky," says I, "Wocky, I have thought so for 
years, and so's all our family." 

He told me I must go to the tent of the Strong Heart and eat raw dog. 
It don't agree with me. I prefer simple food. I prefer pork-pie, because 
tiien I know what I'm eating. But as raw dog was all they proposed to 
give to me I had to eat it or starve. So at the expiration of two days I 
seized a tin plate and went to the chief's daughter, and I said to lier in a 
silvery voice — in a kind of German-silvery voice — I said: 

" Sweet child of the forest, the pale-face wants his dog." 

There was nothing but his paws. I had paused too long — which reminds 
me that time passes — a way which time has. I was told in my youth to 
seize opportunity. I once tried to seize one. IIo was rich ; he liad dia- 
monds on. As I seized him he knocl<ed me down. Since then I have 
learned that he who seizes opportunity sees the penitentiary. 



SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS. 

The Jumping Fkog of Calaveras County. 

" Well, there was a feller here once by the name of Jim Smiley in the win- 
ter of '49, or may be it was the spring of '50 — I don't lecollect exactly, some- 
how, though wiiut makes mo think it was one or the other is because I 
remember the big flume warn't finished when he first come to the camp. 
But any way, he w^as the curiousest man about, always betting on anything 
tiiat turned up you ever see, if he could get any body to bet on the other 
side; and if he couldn't he'd change sides. Any way that suited the other 
side would suit Mm — any way just so's he got a bet he was satisfied. But 



Samuel Langhorne Clemens. 273 

still he was lucky, uncommon lucky; he most always caoic out wiuuer. 
He was always ready and laying for a chance. There couldn't be no solit'ry 
thing mentioned but tliat feller'd offer to bet ou it and take any side you 
please, as I was just telling you. If there was a liorse-race you'd find him 
flush or you'd find him busted at the end of it. If there was a dog-fight, 
he'd bet on it; if there was a cat-figlit, lie'd bet on it; if there was a 
chicken-fight, he'd bet on it. "Why, if there was two birds setting on a 
fence, he would bet you which one would fly first. Or if there was a 
camp-meeting, he would be there reg'lar to bet on Parson Walker, which he 
judged to be the best exhorter about here, and so he was, too, and a good 
man. If he even see a straddle-bug start to go anywheres he would bet 
you how long it would take him to get to — to wherever he was going to ; 
and if you took him up he would follow that straddle-bug to Mexico but 
what he would find out where he was bound for and how long he was 
on the road. Lots of the boys here has seen that Smiley, and can tell 3 ou 
about him. Why, it never made no difference to Idvi, he'd bet any thing 
— the dangdest feller. Parson Walker's wife laid very sick once for a good 
while, and it seemed as if they warn't going to save her; but one morning 
he come in and Smiley up and asked him how she was, and he said she was 
consid'able better — thank the Lord for his inf 'nit mercy 1 — and coming on 
so smart that, with the blessing of Providence, she'd get well yet; and 
Smiley, before he thouglit, says, ' WeU, I'll resk two-and-a-half she don't, 
any way.' 



" Well, this yer Smiley had rat-terriers, and chicken-cocks, and tom-cats, 
and all them kind of things till you couldn't rest, and you couldn't fetch notii- 
ing for him to bet on but he'd match you. He ketched a frog one day and 
took him home, and said he cal'lated to educate him ; and so he never done 
nothing for three months but set in his back-yard and learn that frog to 
jump. And you bet you he did learn him, too. He'd give him a litile 
punch behind, and the next minute you'd see that frog whirling in the air 
like a doughnut — see him turn one summerset, or may be a couple, if he got 
a good start, and come down flat-footed and all right, like a cat. He got 
him up so in the matter of ketching flies, and kep' him in practice so con- 
stant, that he'd nail a fly every time as fur as he could see him. Smiley said 
all a frog wanted was education and he could do 'most any thing, and I be- 
lieve him. Why, I've seen him set Dan'l Webster down here on this floor 
— Dan'l Webster was the name of the frog — and sing out, 'Flics, Dan'l, 
flies 1 ' and quicker'n you could wink he'd spring straight up and snake a fly 
ofif'n the counter there and flop down on the floor ag'in as solid as a gob of 
18 



274 Initial Studies in American Letters. 

mud, and fall to scratching tlie side of his head with his hind foot as indif- 
ferent as if he hadn't no idea he'd been doin' any more'n any frog might do. 
You never see a frog so modest and straightfor'ard as he was, for all he 
was so gifted. And when it come to fair and square jumping on a dead 
level he conld get over more ground at one straddle than any animal of his 
breed you ever see. Jumping on a dead level was his strong suit, you un- 
derstand; and when it come to that, Smiley would ante up money on him 
as long as he had a red. Smiley was monstrous proud of his frog, and well 
he might be, for fellers that had traveled and been every-wheres all said he 
laid over any frog that ever they see. 

" Well, Smiley kep' the beast in a little lattice-box, and he used to fetch 
him down-town sometimes and lay for a bet. One day a feller — a stranger 
in the camp he was — come acrost him with his box and says : 

" ' What might it be that you've got in the box ? ' 

" And Smiley says, sorter indifferent like, 'It might be a parrot, or it 
might be a canary, may be, but it ain't — it's only just a frog.' 

"And the feller took it, and looked at it careful, and turned it round 
this way and that, and saj's, ' H'm — so 'tis. Well, what's he good for? ' 

" ' Well,' Smiley says, easy and careless, ' he's good enough for one thing, 
I should judge — he can outjump any frog in Calaveras County.' 

" The feller took the box again and took another long, particular look and 
give it back to Smiley, and says, very deliberate: 'Well,' he says, 'I don't 
see no p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog.' 

" ' May be you don't,' Smiley says. ' May be you understand frogs, and 
may be you don't understand 'em; may be you've had experience, and 
may be you aint only a amature, as it were. Anyways, I've got my 
opinion, and I'll resk forty dollars that he can outjump any frog in Calaveras 
County.' 

"And the feller studied a minute, and then says, kinder sad like, 

" ' Well, I'm only a stranger here, and I aint got no frog ; but if I had a 
frog I'd bet you 1 ' 

" And then Smiley says, ' That's all right — that's all right ; if you'll hold 
my box a minute I'll go and get you a frog.' And so the feller took the 
box, and put up his forty dollars along with Sniiley's, and set down to 
wait. 

" So he set there a good while, thinking and thinking to hisself, and then 
he got the frog out and pried his mouth open, and took a teaspoon and filled 
him full of quail-shot — tilled him pretty near up to his chin — and set him 
on the floor. Smiley, he went to the swamp and slopped around in the 
mud for a long time, and finally he ketched a frog, and fetched him in, and 
give him to this feller, and says, " ' Now, if you're ready, set him along- 



Samuel Langhorne Clemens. 275 

side of Dan'l, wiLli liis forepaws just even with Dan'l, and I'll give the 
word.' Tlien he says, ' One — two — three — git! ' and him and the feller 
touched up the frogs from behind, and the new ivo'^ hopped off lively, but 
Dan'l give a heave, and hysted up his shoulders — so — like a Frenchman, 
but it warn't no use — he couldn't budge ; he was planted as solid as a 
church, and wouldn't no more stir than if he was anchored out. Smiley 
was a good deal surprised, and he was disgusted too, but he didn't have no 
idea what the matter was, of course. 

" The feller took the money and started away ; but when he was going 
out at the door he sorter jerked his thumb over his shoulder — so — at Dan'l, 
and says again, very deliberate, ' Well,' he says, ' I don't see no p'iuts about 
that frog that's any better'n any other frog.' 

" Smiley, he stood scratching his head and looking down at Dan'l a long 
time, and at last he says, ' I do wonder what in the nation that frog throwed 
off for. I wonder if there aint sometliing the matter with him — he 'pears 
to look mighty baggy, somehow.' And he ketched Dan'l by the nap of the 
neck, and hefted him, and says, ' Why, blame ray cats if he don't weigh 
five pound ! ' and turned him upside down, and he belched out a double 
handful of shot. And then he see how it was, and he was the maddest 
man. He set the frog down and took out after the feller, but he never 
ketched him." 



INDEX. 



An Index to the American Authors: and Writings artd the Principal American 
Periodicals mentioned in this Volume, 



Abraham Lincoln, 143. 

Adams and Liberty, 60. 

Adams, Jotin, 49. 

Adams, J. Q., 73, 85. 

Adams, Samuel, 43, 44. 

After-Diiiner Poem, 135. 

After the Funeral, 142. 

Ase of Reason, The, 51-53, 60. 

Arcs, The, 1.53. 

Alcotl, A. B., 93, 104. 

Aldrich, T. B., 170, 197. 

Algerine Captive, The, 63. 

Alglc Researches, 130. 

Alhambra, The, 74. 

All Quiet Along the Potomac, 184. 

Alnwick Cfistle, 81. 

Alsop, Richard, 55, 56. 

American, The, 206. 

American Civil War, The, 182. 

American Conflict, The, 182. 

American Flag, The, 80. 

American Note-Books, 95, 114, 116, 119, 

128. 
American Scholar, The, 93, 104, 123. 
Ames, Fisher, 50, 51. 
Among My Books, 143. 
Anabel Lee, 165. 
Anarchiad, The, .55. 
Army Life in a Black Regiment, 186. 
Army of tlie Potomac, The, 183. 
Art of Book-Making, The, 77. 
" Artemus Ward," 188, 189-193, 194. 
Arthur Mervyn, 63. 65. 
At Teague Poteet's, 203. 
Atlantic Monthly, The, 136, 143, 150, 151, 

185, 186, 195," 197, 208. 
Atlantis, 169. 
Auf Wiedersehen, 143. 
Autobiography, Franklin's, 28, 38, 39, 40, 

73. 
Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, The, 132, 

136, 137. 
Autumn, 135. 



Backwoodsman, The, 73. 

Ballad of the (^ysterman, 133. 

Ballads and Other Poems, 136. 

Bancroft, George, 1255, 138, 145, 146. 

Barbara Frietchie, 158. 

Barlow, Joel, 51, .52, .55-.58. 

Battle Hymn of the Republic, 183. 

Battle of the Kegs, 59. 

Battlefield, The, 1.54. 

Bay Fight, The, 184. 

Bay Psalm Book, The, 21. 

Bedouin Song, 173. 

Beecher, H. W., 175, 176. 

Beecher, Lyman, 98, 175. 

Beers, Mrs. E. L., 184. 

Beleaguered City, The, 126, 129. 

Belfry of Bruges, The, 126, 127. 

Beverly, Robert, 17. 

Biglow Papers, The, 139-142, 159, 188. 

" Bill Nye," 193. 

Black Cat, The, 166. 

Black Fox of Salmon River, The, 157. 

Blair, James, 14. 

Blithedale Romance, The, 95, 118, 172, 

Bloody Tenent of Persecution, The, '£1 

Blue and the Gray, The, 184. 

Boker, G. H., 197. 

Bostonians, The, 309. 

Boys, The, 134. 

Bracebridge Hall, 75, 76, 187. 

Bradford's Journal, 21, 24, 25, 31, 33. 

Brahma, 105, 109. 

Brainard, J. G. C, 156, 157, 17.5. 

Brick Moon, The, 196. 

Bridal of Peiinacook, The, 1.57, 159. 

Bridge, The, 129. 

Broken Heart, The, 77. 

Brown, C. B., 6:5-65. 

Browne, C. F. (See " Artemus Ward.' 

Brownell, H. H., 184, 1,S.5. 

Bryant, W. C, 68, 80, 124, 135, 133, 151- 

163, 169. 
Buccaneer, The, 89, 



\ 



Indkx. 



277 



Building of the Ship, The, 127. 
Bundle of Letters, A, SOU. 
Kuniett. Mrs. F. H., iJ05. 
Kiishuell, Ilonice, 99. 
Biisy-Bodv, The, 38, 53, 74. 
ISutler, W". A., 170. 
Byrd, Wui., 16, 17. 

Cable. G. W., !.'03. 

Calhoun, J. C, 46, 86. 

(';inibrid{re Thirty Years Ago, 123. 

«;ip<' C'xi, 111. 

C.ipliire of Fusritive Sliives, 140. 

Cary, Alice, 173. 

Gary, Plicebe, 173. 

Cask of Amontillado, The, 166. 

Cassandra Southwick, 159. 

Cathedral, The, 144. 

Cecil Dreeme, 185. 

Century Magazine, The. 1.50, 18-3, r.t7. 

Chambered Nautilus, The, 135. 

Chance Acquaintance, A. 2ii.S. 

Channing, W. E., 73, I) • 92. 03,97-100,106. 

Channing, W. E., Jr., 106, 110, 119. 

(Iianning, W. H., 106. 

Chapel of the Hermits, The, 158. 

Cliaracter of Milton, The, 91. 

Cliarleston, 184. 

Children of Adam, 177. 

(.:hoate, Rufus, 89, 90. 

Christian Examiuer, The, 91. 

Circular Letters, by Otis and Quincy, 44. 

City in the Sea, The, 163. 

Clara Howard, 63. 

Clari, 84. 

Clarke, J. F., 105, 106. 

Clay, Henry, 86. 

Clemens, S. L. (See " Mark Twain.") 

Coluinbiad, The, 56, 57. 

Common Sense, 51. 

Companions of Columbus, 74. 

Condensed Novels, 3(X). 

(londuct of Life, The, 107. 

Confederate States of America, The, 183. 

Conquest of Cianaan, 57. 

Conquest of Granada, 73, 74, 78. 

Conquest of Mexico, 145. 

Conquest of Peru, 145. 

Conspiracy of Pontiac, The, 147. 

Constitution and the Union, The, 87. 

Constitution of the United States, The, 45, 

85. 
Contentment, 8-5. 
Contrast, The, 63. 
Conversations on the Gospels, 104. 
Conversations on Some of the Old Poets, 

143. 
Cooke, J. E., 169. 
Cooper, J. F., 61, 71, 73, 81-81, 89, 107, 130, 

147, 168, 204. 
Coral (irove. The, 175. 
Cotton, John, 22, -£1 38, 39. 
(;ount Frontctiac and New France, 147. 
CourtHi', Tlif, 111, 1S8. 
Counslijp (if Miles Standish, The, 36. 
Cow Chase, The, 59. 



Cranch, C. P., 95, 106. 
Crime against Kansas, The, 149 
Crisis, ThH, 51. 
Croaker Papers, The, 81. 
Culprit Fay, The, 80. 
Curtis, G. VV., 95, 197. 

Daisy Miller, 206. 

Dana, C. A., 95, 106, 151. 

Dana, R. H., 68, 89. 

Danbury News Man, 59, 189. 

Dante, Longfellow's, 131, 

Davis, Jefferson, 183. 

Dav is Done, The, 128. 

Davof Doom, The, 34. 

Death of the Flowers. The, 153, 154. 

Declaration of Independence, The, 45, 59, 

85. 
Deerslayer, The, 83, 84. 
Democratic Vistas, 180. 
Derby, G. H., 190. 
Descent into the Maelstrom, 166. 
Deserted Road, The, 173. 
Dial, The, 93, 98, 105, 106. ' 
Dialogue Between Franklin and the Gout, 

39. 
Diamond Leus, The, 186. 
Discourse of the Plantation of Virginia, A, 

13. 
Dolph Heyliger, 75. 
Domain of Arntieini, The, 166. 
Dorchester Giant, The, 132. 
Drake, J. R., 80, 81, 89. 
Draper, J. W., 183. 
Dream Life, 17'5. 
Drifting, 173. 

Driving Home the Cows, 184, 
Drum Taps, 180. 
Dutchman's Fireside, The, 79. 
Dwight, J. S., 95, 100, 106. 
Dwight, Theodore, 55, .56. 
Dwight, Timothy, 5.5, 57, 58 

Early Spring in Massachusetts, 111. 

Echo, The, 56. 

Echo Club, The, 173. 

Edgar Huntley, 63, 65. 

Edith Lin.sey, 170. 

Edwards. Jonathan, 3.5-37, .58, 91, 97, 99. 

Eggleston, Edward, 2C2. 

Elevator, The, 63, 310. 

Eliot, John, 31, 33. 

Elsie Venner, 137. 

Emerson, Charles, 106. 

Emerson, R. W., 88, 93, 96-113, 119, 123, 133, 

138, 139, 138, 151, 154, 160, 179. 
Endicott's Red Cross, 35, 118. 
English Note-Books, 119. 
English Traits, 103, 109. 
Ephemerte, 176. 
Epilogue to (:ato, 60. 
Eternal Goodness, 158. 
Ethan Brand, 117. 
Europeans, The, 306. 307, 
Evangeline, 139, 1:30. 
Eveuing Wind, The, 153. 



2V8 



Index. 



Everett, Edward, 89, 90, 133, 138, 189. 

Excelsior, 137. 

Excursions, 111. 

Expediency of the Federal Constitution. 

48. 
Eyes and Ears, 176. 

F. Smith, 170. 

Fable for Critics, A, 105, 143, 144. 

Facts in the case of M. Valdemar, The, 164, 

Fall of the House of Usher, The, ItiC. 

Familists' Hymn, The, 35. 

P'iinshawe, 116. 

Farewell Address, Washington's, 49. 

Faust, Taylor's, 173. 

Federalist, The, 48, 49. 

Ferdinand and Isabella, 133, 145. 

Final Judgment, The, 35. 

Finch, F. M., 184. 

Fire of Driftwood, The, 138. 

Fireside Travels, 123. 

Fitz Adam's Story, 141. 

Flint, Timothy, 73. 

Flood of Years, The, 155. 

Footpath, The, 143. 

Footsteps of Angels, 136. 

Foregone Conclusion, A, 307. 

Forest Hymn, 153. 

Fortune of the Republic, 107. 

Foster, S. C, 173, 174. 

France and England in North America, 

147. 
Franklin, Ben., 38, 37, 40, .53, 53, 73, 74. 
Freedom of the Will, 35. 
French Poets and Novelists, 205. 
Freneau, Philip, 60-63. 
Fuller, Margaret, 93, 95, 99, 100, 105, 106, 

109, 119, 131. 

Galaxy Magazine, The, 197. 

Garrison, W. L., 36, 87, 147, 156, 1.57, 174. 

Garrison of Cape Ann, The, 33. 

Geography of tbe Mississippi Valley, 73. 

Georgia Spec, The, 63. 

Ghost Ball at Congress Hall, The, 170. 

(iive Me the Old, 170. 

Godev's Lady's Book, 150, 160. 

Godfrey, Thomas, 63. 

Gold Bug, The, HiS. 

Golden Legend, The, 130. 

Good News from Virginia, 18. 

Good Word for Winter, A, 143. 

Goodrich, S. G., 69, 73, 116. 

Graham's Magazine, 150, 160, 163, 164, 171. 

Grandfather's Chair, 33. 

Grandissimes, The, 203. 

Greeley, Horace, 95, 171, 183. 

Green River, 153. 

Greene, A. G., 85. 

Greenfield Hill, 58. 

Guardian Angel, The, 137, 138. 

Hail, Columbia ! 59, 60, 80. 
Hale, E. E., 133, 164, 19.5, 196. 
Halleek, F. G., 80,81, 89, 109. 
Halpine, C. G., 186. 



Hamilton, Alexander, 48, 49, 51, 87. 

Hannah Thurston, 173. 

Hans Breitmann Ballads, 303. 

Hans Pfaall, 163. 

Harbinger, The, 94, 95. 

Harper's Monthly Magazine, 150, 151, 197. 

Harris, J. C, 303. 

Harte, F. B., 193, 198-303. 

Hasty Pudding, 57. 

Haunted Palace, The, 165. 

Hawthorne, Julian, 118. 

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 9, 18, 35, 33, 56, 63, 
93, 9.5, 105, 106, 108, 114-130, 124, 138, 
139, 137, 138, 150, 160, 166, 173, 183, 185, 
187, 188, 204, 305, 309. 

Hay, John. 201, 203. 

Health, A, 85. 

Heathen Chinee, The, 200. 

Hedge, F. H., 95. 

Height of the Ridiculous, The, 133, 

Henry, Patrick, 43, 44, 48. 

Hiawatha, 61, 130. 

Higginson, T. W., 7.5, 9,5, 105, 186. 

His Level Best, 195. 

History of New England, Winthrop's, 34- 
27. 

Histoiy of Plymouth Plantation, Brad- 
lord's, 34. 25. 

History of the Dividing Line, 16, 17. 

History of the United Netherlands, 146. 

History of the United States, Bancroft's, 
123, 146; Higginson's, 75. 

Histoiy of Virginia, Beverly's, 17 ; Smith's, 
15; Stith's, 17. 

Hoffman, C. F., 170. 

Holland, J. G., 197. 

Holmes, O. W., 29, 85, 93, 94, 122, 123, 131- 
138, 141, 151, 153, 160, 183, 186, 187, 188. 

Home, Sweet Home, 84. 

Homesick in Heaven, 135. 

Hooker, Thomas, 28, 30, 31, 99. 

Hoosier Schoolmaster, The, 202. 

Hopkins, Lemuel, 55. 

Hopkinson, Francis, 59. 

Hopkinsou, Joseph, .59. 

Horse-Shoe Robinson, 168. 

House of the Seven Gables, The, 115, 118. 

Howe, Mrs. J. W., 183. 

Howells, W. D., 63,203-205, 207-210. 

Humphreys, David, 55, 56. 

Hymn at the Completion of Concord Mon- 
ument, 110. 

Hymn of the Moravian Nuns, 125. 

Hymn to the Night, 126. 

Hymn to the North Star, 152. 

Hyperion, 131. 

Ichabod, 158. 

If, Yes, and Perhaps, 195. 

Iliad, Bryant's, 155. 

Illustrious Providences. 29. 

In the Tennessee Mountains, 203. 

In the Twilight, 142. 

In War Time, 157. 

Independent, The, 176. 

Indian Bible, Eliot's, 31. 



Index. 



279 



Indian Buryinff-Ground, The, 61. 
Indian Student, Tlie. til. 
Indian Summer, ~08, 2(Kt. 
Infrtiam Papers, 195. 
Inlvlings of Adventure, 109. 
Innocents Abroad, 193, 194. 
International Episode, An, 206, 207. 
Irving, Washington, 42, 53, 68, 71, 73-82, 

89, 117, 138, 187, 188, 194, 206. 
Israfel, 162. 
Italian Journeys, 208. 
Italian Note-Books, 119. 

James, Henry, 185, 203-210. 

Jane Talbot, 63. 

Jay, John, 48, 49. 

Jefferson, Thomas, 14, 45-48, 50, 52, 61. 

Jesuits in North America, The, 147. 

Jim, 201. 

Jim Bludso, 201. 

John Brown's Body, 59, 183. 

John Godfrey's Fortune, 172. 

"John Phoenix," 190. 

John Underbill, 25. 

Jonathan to John, 141. 

"Josh Billings," 193. 

Journey to the Land of Eden, A, 17. 

Judd, Sylvester, 144. 

Jumping Frog. The, 193. 

June, 153, 154. 

Justice and Expediency, 157. 

Kansas and Nebraska Hill, The, 149. 

Katie, 184. 

Kennedy, J. P., 108. 

Key into the Language of America, A, 33. 

Key, F. S., 60. 

Kldd, the Pirate, 75. 

King's Missive, The, 159. 

Knickerbocker Magazine, The, 75, 79, 116, 

147, 160. 
Knickerbocker's History of New York, 68, 

73, 75, 76, 187. 

Lady of the Aroostook, The, 207, 209. 

Lanier, Sidney, 202. 

La Salle and the Discovery of the Great 

West, 147. 
Last Leaf, The, 85, 133. 
Last of the Mohicans, The, 83, 84. 
Last of the Valerii, The, 205. 
Latest Form of Infidelity, The, 99. 
Laus Deo, 158. 

Leatherstocking Tales, 61, 83, 84. 
Leaves of Grass, 176, 177, 179. 
Lecture on the Mormons, 190-192. 
Legend of Brittany, l:iS. 
Legend of Sleepy Hollow, 75, 77. 
Legends of New England, 156, 157. 
Legends of the Province House, 118. 
Leland, C. G., 202. 
Letter on Whitewashing, 59. 
Letters and Social Alms, 107. 
Letters from Under a Bridge, 169, 170. 
Letters of a Traveler, 155. 
Liberator, The, 86, 147, 174. 



Life of Columbus, Irving's, 74, 78. 

Life of Goldsmith, 79. 

Life of John of Barneveld, 146. 

Life of Washington, Irving's, 78. 

Ligeia, 165. 

Light of Stars, The, 126. 

Lincoln, Abraham, 51, 133, 180, 186, 189, 

Lines on Leaving Europe, 170. 

Lippincott's Magazine, 197. 

Literary Recreations, 160. 

Literati of New York, 160. 

Little Breeches, 201. 

Livingston, William, 53. 

Locke, David R., 193. 

Longfellow, H. W., 18, 25, 26, 61, 115, 116, 

123-131, 13.3, 138, 139, 141, 142, 151, 159, 

160, 162, 167, 172, 179, 197. 
Lost Arts, 148. 
Lost Cause, The, 183. 
Lowell, J. R., 12, 93, 96, 104, 105, 107, 122, 

12;3, 138-144, 151, 154, 159, 100, 172, 174, 

183, 187, 188, 197. 
Luck of Roaring Camp, The, 199. 
Lunatic's Skate, The, 170. 
Lyrics of a Day, 184. 

MacFingal, 54, 55, 59, 73. 

Madison, James, 48, 49, 61. 

Madonna of the Future, The, 205. 

Magnalia Christi Americana, 19, 28-34,73. 

Mahomet and his Successors, 78. 

Maine Woods, The, 111. 

" Major Jack Downing," 189. 

Man of the Cro%d, The, 160. 

Man-of-War Bird, The, 179. 

Man Without a Country, The, 134, 195. 

Marble Faun, The, 115, 117, 118, 119. 

Marco Bozzaris, 81. 

Margaret, 144. 

"Mark Twain," 188, 189, 193, 194. 

Maryland, My Maryland, 183. 

Masque of the (Jods, The, 171. 

Masque of the Red Death, 100. 

Mather, Cotton, 19, 20, 31, 23, 20, 28-34, 36, 

73. 
Mather, Increase, 29, 31. 
Maud Muller, 158. 
May-Day, 107. 

Maypole of Merrymount. The, 25. 
Memoranda of the Civil War, 180. 
Memorial History of Boston, 159. 
Men Naturally God's Enemies, 35. 
Merry Mount, 145. 
Messenger, R. H., 170. 
Miggles, 200. 
"Miles O'Reilly," ISO. 
Minister's Black Veil, The, 117. 
Minister's Wooing, The, 175. 
Mitchell, D. G., 175. 
Mocking Bird, The, 202. 
Modern Instance, A, 208, 209. 
Modern Learning, 59. 
Modest Request, A, 134. 
Money DiirffiTs, The, 75. 
Montcalai ami Wolfe, 147. 
Monterey, 170. 



280 



Index. 



Moore, C. C, 170. 

Moore, Frank, 183. 

Moral Argument Against Calvinism, The, 

90. 
Morris, G. P., 170. 
Morton's Hope, 145. 
Mosses from an Old Manse, 114, 117. 
Motley, J. L., 122, 138, 145, 146. 
Mount Vernon, Stj. 
" Mrs. Partington," 189. 
MS. Found in a Bottle, 168. 
Murder of Lovejoy, The, 123. 
Murders in the Riie Moigue, The, 163. 
Murfree, Mary N., 203. 
Music-Grinders, Tlie, 133. 
My Aunt, 133. 
My Captain, 180. 

My Double and Uovv He Undid Me, 196. 
My Garden Acquaintance, 143. 
My Life is Like the Suuiiuer Rose, 85. 
My Old Kentucky Home, 173. 
My Search for the Captain, 186, 
My Study Windows, 143. 
My Wife and I, 175. 
Mystery of Giljral, The, 201. 
Mystery of Marie Roget, The, 163. 

Narrative of A. Gordon Pym, The, 166. 

Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife, 118. 

Nature, S3, 101, 103, 107. 

Naval History of the United States, 81. 

Nearer Home, 173. 

Negro Melodies, 173. 

Nelly was a Lady, 173. 

New England Tragedies, 25. 

New En^and Two Centuries Ago, 141, 143. 

New Systenmf Euylisli (Jrainmar, A, 190. 

New York Evening Post, The, 152, 155. 

New York Tribune, The, 95, 171. 

New(^l, R. H., 193. 

North American Review, The, 89, 116, 124, 

143, El, 152. 
Norton, Andrews, 99. 
Notes on Virginia, 47. 
Nothing to Wear, 170. 
Nux Postcoenatica, 134. 

O, Susanna, 173. 
O'Brien, F. J., 185. 

Observations on the Boston Port Bill, 44. 
Occultation of Orion, The, 127, 139. 
Ode at the Harvai-d Conunemoration, 143. 
Ode for a Social Meeting, 134. 
Ode to Freedom, 140. 
Odyssey, Bryant's, 155. 
Old Clock on the Stairs, The, 127. 
Old Creole Days, 203. 
Old Folks at Home, 173. 
Old Grimes, 85. 
Old Ironsides, 132. 
Old Oaken Bucket, The, 84. 
Old Pennsylvania Farmer, The, 171. 
Old Regime in Canada, The, 147. 
Old Sergeant, The, 1.S4. 
On a Certain Condesceusiou in Foreigners, 
141. 



One Hoss Shay, The, 135, 188. 

Oregon Trail, The, 147. 

Ormond, 63, 64. 

" Orpheus C. Kerr," 193. 

Orphic Sayings, 105. 

Osgood, Mrs. K. P., 184. 

Otis, James, 43-45. 

Our Master, 158. 

Our Old Home, 119. 

Out of the Question, 309. 

Outcasts of Poker Flat, The, 199, 200. 

Outre-Mer, 134. 

Overland Monthly, The, 199. 

Over-Soul, The, 105. 

Paine, R. T., 60. 

Paine, Tom, 51-53. 

Panorama, The, 157. 

Paper, 39. 

Parker, Theodore, 07-100, 106. 

Parkman, Francis, 13:3, 145,146, 147. 

Parlor Car, The, 310. 

Partisan, The, 168. 

Passionate Pilgrim, A, 305. 

Pathflnder, The, 83. 

Paulding, J. K., 73, 74, 79, 80. 

Payne, J. H., 84. 

Pearl of Orr's Island, The, 175. 

Penciiings by the Way, 169. 

Pension Beaurepas, The, 306. 

Percival, J. G., 175. 

Percy, George, 13, 19. 

" Peter Parley," 69. 

"Petroleum V. Nasby," 193. 

Phenomena Quajdam Apocalyptica, 33. 

Phillips, Wendell, 133. 13;j, 147, 148, 157, 

174. 
Philosov)hic Solitude, .53. 
Philosophy of Composition, 163. 
Phoenixiana, 189. 
Piatt, J. J., 184, 303, 308. 
Pictures of Memory, 173. 
Pilot, The, 84. 

Pink and White Tyranny, 175. 
Pinkney, E. C, 85. 
Pioneer, The, 138. 
Pioneers, The, 71, 83. 
Pioneers of France in the New World, 

147. 
Plain Language from Truthful James, 

200. 
Planting of the Apple-Tree, The, 155. 
Plato, Emerson on, 108. 
Poe, E. A., 63, 80, 85, 106, 116, 117, 130, 138, 

150, 153, 160-169, 183, 186, 196. 
Poems of the Orient, 171. 
I'oems of Two Friends, 208. 
Poems on Slavery, 138. 
Poet at the Breakfast Table, The, 136. 
Poetic Principle, The, 161. 
Poetry: A Metrical Essay, 133. 
Poet's Hope, A, 105. 
Political Green House, The, 56. 
Pollard, E. A., 183. 
Pons, Maxiirius, 173. 
Poor Richard's Almanac, 39, 40. 



Index. 



281 



Portraits of Places, 307. 

Prairie, Tbe, Ki. 

Prentice, G. D., 15(5, 189. 

Prescott, W. H., 13:?, 14.5, 146, 151, 183. 

Present Crisis, The, 140. 

Pride of the Village, The, 77. 

Prince Deukalion, 171. 

Prince of Parthia, The, 63. 

Problem, The, 110. 

Professor at the Brealitast Table, The, 

136, 137. 
Progress to the Mines, A, 17. 
Prologue, The, 135. 
Prophecy of Samuel Sewell, The, 33. 
Prophet, The, 171. 
Psalm of Life, The, 1,'20, 137. 
Purloined Letter, The, 163. 
Putnam's Monthly, 133, 197. 

QualJer Widow, The, 171. 
Quincy, Josiah, 43-45. 

Rag Mau and Rag Woman, The, 196. 

Randall, J. R., 183. 

Randolph, John, 46. 

Raven, The, 163, 165. 

Read, T. B., 173. 

Reaper and the Flowers, The, 136. 

Rebellion Record, The, 183. 

Recollections of a Life-time, 69, 73. 

Red Rover, The, 84. 

Register, The, 210. 

Remarlis on Associations, 91. 

Remarlis on National Literature, 91, 100. 

Reply to Hayne, Webster's, 87. 

Representative Men, 103, 107, 109. 

Resignation, 138. 

Reveries of a Bachelor, 175. 

Rhoecus, 138. 

Rhymes of Travel, 171. 

Riding to Vote, 184. 

Rights of the British Colonies, 45. 

Ripley, George, 95, 99, 100, 106, 151. 

Rip Van Winkle, 75. 

Rip Van Winkle, M.D., 134. 

Rise and Fall of the Confederate States, 

183. 
Rise and Fall of the Slave Power, 183. 
Rise of the Dutch Republic, 146. 
Rob of the Bowl, 168. 
Roderick Hudson, 306. 
Roughing It, 193, 194. 

Salmagundi, 74, 79, 155. , 

Sandys, George, 16, 19. 

San Francisco, 198. 

Scarlet Letter, The, 25, 117, 118, 

School Days, 156. 

Schoolcraft, H. R., 130. 

Science of English Verse, 202. 

Scribner's Monthly, 197. 

Sci'ipture Poems, 169. 

Seaside and Fireside, 136, 127. 

Seaweed, 137, 139. 

Selling of Joseph, The, 33, 

September Gale, The, 133. 



Sewall, J, M., 60. 

Sewall, Samuel, 33, 33. 

Shakespeare, Ode, 89. 

Shaw, H. W., 193. 

Sheplierd of King Admetus, The, 138. 

Sheridan's Ride, 173. 

Shillaber, B. P., 189. 

Sigourney, Mrs. L. H.. 107, 175. 

Si his, Lapham, 309. 

Simms, W. G., 168. 

Simple Cobbler of Agiwam, The, 20. 

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, 35. 

Skeleton in Armor, The, 137. 

Skeleton in Uie Closet, The, 196. 

Sketch Book, The, 73-75, 77. 

Skipper Ireson's Ride, 158. 

Sleeper, The, 165. 

Sleeping Car, The, 63. 

Smith, Elihu, .55. 

Smith, John, 11, 13, 15, 19, 24. 

Smith, Seba, 189. 

Snow-Bound, 159. 

Society and Solitude, 107. 

Song for a Temperance Dinner, 134. 

Song of the Chattahoochie, 303. 

Southern Literary Messenger, The, 160, 163. 

Southern Passages and Pictures, 169. 

Sparkling and Bright, 170. 

Specimen Days, 180. 

Specimens of Foreign Standard Literaturci 

100. 
Sphinx, The, 135. 
Sprague, Charles, 89. 
Spring, l70. 
Spy, The, 83. 
Squibob Papers, 180. 
Star Papers, 176. 

Star-Spangled Banner, The, 60, 80. 
Stedman, E. C, 197. 
Stephens, A. H., 182. 
Stith, William, 17. 
Stoddard, R. H., 170, 197. 
Story of Kennett, The, 173. 
Stowe, Mrs. H. B., 174, 175. 
Strachey, William, 11. 
Stuart, Moses, 98. 
Suburban Sketches, 308. 
Sumner, Charles, 133, 133, 124, 143, 148, 

157, 174. 
Supernaturalism in New England, 160. 
Swallow Barn, 168. 
Swinton,W., 183. 
Sybaris and Other Homes, 195. 

Tales of a Traveler, 75. 

Tales of a Wayside Inn, 1.59. 

Tales of the Glauber Spa, 1.5.5, 

Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, 

166. 
Tamerlane, 161. 
Tanglewood Tales, 119. 
Taylor, Bayard, 170-ir3, 
Telling the Bees, 1.59. 
Ten Times One is Ten, 195. 
Tennessee's Partner, 300. 
Tent on the Beach, The, 159. 



282 



Index. 



Thanatopsis, 68, 80, 125, 152, 153, 155. 

Their Wedding Journey, 208. 

Tiieology, Dwighl's, 58. 

Tliirty Poems, 1.54. 

Thoreau, H. D., 93, 96, 106, 109, 110, 114, 

119, 122, 12:3, 125, 151, 179, 182. 
Tinirod, Henry, 184. 
To a Waterfowl, 153. 
To Helen, 162. 

To M from Abroad, 170. 

To One in Paradise, 165. 

To Seneca Lake, 175. 

Tour on the Prairies, A, 71. 

Tramp Abroad, A, 193. 

Transcendentalist, The, 101, 102. 

Travels, Dwight's, .53. 

Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, 

36. 
Triumph of Infldellly, 58. 
True Grandeur of Nations, The, 149. 
True Relation, Smith's, 15. 
True Repertory of the Wrack of Sir Thomas 

Gates, 11. 
Trumbull, John, .54, .55, 73. 
Twice-Told Tales, 115, 117,118. 
Two Rivers, 112. 
Tyler, Royall, 63. 

Ulalume, 165. 
Uncle Ned, 173. 
Uncle Remus, 202. 
Uncle Tom's Cabin, 174. 
Under the Willows, 143. 
Undiscovered Country, The, 209. 
Unknown Dead, The, 184. 
Unseen Spirits, 170. 

Valley of Unrest, The, 162. 

Vanity Fair, 190. 

Vassall Morton, 145. 

Venetian Life, 208. 

Views Afoot, 171. 

Villa Franca, 142. 

Village Blacksmith, The, 127. 

Virginia Comedians, The, 196. 

Vision of Columbus, The, .56, 57. 

Vision of Sir Launfal, The, 140, 141. 

Visit from St. Nicholas, A, 170. 

Voices of Freedom, 157. 

Voices of the Night, 124, 126. 

Voluntaries, 110. 

Von Kempelen's Discovery, 154. 

Walden, 111. 

Wants of Man, The, 85. 

War Lyrics, 184. 



Ward, Nathaniel, 20. 

Ware, Henry, 99. 

Washers of the Shroud, The, 143L 

Washington, George, 49, 51. 

Washington as a Camp, 185. 

Washington Square, 18.5. 

'Way Down South, 173. 

Webster, Daniel, 73, 86-89, 90, 158, 187. 

Webster's Spelliug-Book, 69. 

Week on the Concord and Merrlmac 

Rivers, A, 111. 
Western Windows, 202. 
Westminster Abbey, 77. 
Westover MSS., The, 16. 
Westward Ho ! 72. 
What Mr. Robinson thinks, 140. 
What was It ? 186. 
Whistle, The, 39. 
Whitaker, Alexander, 18. 
White, R. G., 197. 
Whitman, Walt, 126, 176-180, 183. 
W^hlttier, J. G., 18, 25, 26, 32, 33, 93, 133, 

138, 155-160, 167, 174, 175, 179, 183, 185, 

197. 
Wieland, 63, 65. 
Wigglesworth, Michael, 34. 
Wild Honeysuckle, The, 61. 
W^ilde, R. H., 84. 
William Wilson, 166. 
Williams, Roger, 22, 23. 
Willis, N. P., 71, 153, 169, 171, 176. 
Willson Forcevthe, 184. 
Wilson, Henry, 182.' 
Winter Evening Hymn to My Fire, 143. 
Winthrop, John, 12, 21, 23-28, 31, 33. 
Winthrop, Theodore, 184. 
Witchcraft, 143. 
Witch's Daughter, The, 157 
Wolfert's Roost, 75. 
Wolfert Webber, 75. 
Woman in the Nineteenth Century, 105. 
\\'oiHl.'i- Book, 119. 

Wi>ii(lt"is (it the Invisible World, 31, 32. 
Woods, Lt'oiuird, 98. 
Woods in Winter, 125. 
Woodman, Spare that Tree, 170. 
Woodworth, Samuel, 84. 
Woolinan's Journal, 65, 66, 157. 
Wound-Dresser, The, 178. 
Wrath Upon the Wicked, 35. 
Wreck of the Hesperus, The, 137, 129. 

Yankee Doodle, 59. 
Yankee in Canada, 111. 
Year's Life, A, 138. 
Yemassee, The, 168. 



THE END, 



^ 



